Accounting is full of highly risk-averse people willing to trade long hours for a structured and stable career track. If you are not willing to make that trade, you ought to find an opportunity with the balance of risk/reward that suits you better. You can find opportunities that offer different trade-offs too; some places even offer a trade off of hours for pay!
Work is all about finding the trade-off that is right for you. I think its normal if your ideal work/life trade-off evolves over time. If having a truly meaningful career in teaching, social work, financial advising, not-for-profit management, healthcare, whatever, will make you happy for the foreseeable future, then go for it. If working ridiculous hours auditing financial statements for relatively little pay makes you happy, then go for it.
The concept is analogous to the efficient frontier in finance. Think of a graph of Risk versus Reward. Accounting is that point on the graph that has less reward (ie. pay/hr) for the same amount of risk as careers like financial operations, compliance, human resources, or any other more interesting back office function. It is a dominated option. A rational actor ought not to choose it. Unfortunately, that is not how life works. College kids desperate for a career path and a prestigious job sign into the accounting major, begin competing for the prestigious jobs, and start justifying their decisions. Five to ten years later, if they have the self awareness or intelligence to seriously question their lives, begin to freak out about the time they've wasted.
It doesn't matter what kind of work/life trade off you choose, as long as you know yourself well enough to choose the one that makes you happy. Know thyself.
http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130314115932-20017018-the-best-definition-of-success-is-the-one-you-never-use
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