To date, I haven’t heard a good reason for why they keep working so hard. The first thing that jumps out to me is that the publish-or-perish phase selects for

To date, I haven’t heard a good reason for why they keep working so hard. The first thing that jumps out to me is that the publish-or-perish phase selects for workaholics. People who are just pretending to be a workaholic, the type who are just trying to survive until tenure, are much more likely to get burned out and drop out of the running. Thus, those who have an uncanny ability to work ridiculously hard over long periods of time are the ones who survive the selection process and get tenured. Perhaps some of these people genuinely enjoy the work. It would make sense, then, that they are the ones who survive without getting burned out.