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at a remove, the op question has an obvious answer--people are this way because they are taught to be this way. whether you view the effects of this as submission or not is a political matter. whether or not you allow yourself to be sucked into variants on "work obsession" follows from political positions: if you understand the capitalist mode of work organization to be problematic, then you will probably struggle in your own life to not allow it to become how you operate; if you dont, then there's no problem and you'll do what seems to follow for you.
for myself--i can do the academic thing because i shifted around how i work. i like to make stuff. i find aspects of my academic training and interests are important catalysts for that making of stuff. for a long time, i identified very closely with a particular view of being-academic that i found debilitating and which resembled what abaya wrote above---but i figured out that for me other relations are possible and set about building them. so at this point, i see academic work as a day gig--neither better nor worse nor even particularly different from any other. what it is *not* is a space of non-alienated production. for a long time, i thought it was. i was wrong. much of my personal difficulty in reconciling myself to this curious way of life followed from my difficulty in reconciling what i thought it was and what it is.
at this point, i see an academic gig as one that pays the bills, gives me access to resources to plunder, enables teaching (which i kinda like doing)--but mostly which enables me to buy and steal time. protecting my time becomes a priority then. time is what enables other types of production to unfold. whether the outputs please others or not is not my concern--i do the stuff i do because i find the doing to be engaging.
insofar as any day gig is concerned, you only give away what you want to give away at one level or another: no-one actually gives a shit, so the problems and responsibilities are yours. sometimes i think that folk map relations to parents from the viewpoint of children into their careers and look to their day jobs for validation in ways that i find incomprehensible--but which it makes no sense to disapprove of really because they are simply not my choices, they do not correspond to my frame of reference--and because i dont have to live with the consequences and so my inability to understand them doesnt really matter.
i used to wonder what normal is like.
then i figured out that there is no normal.
people go looking for it, but it isnt there. it isnt anywhere. it doesnt exist.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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