R&D is much like startups in this respect, as many have connected. The lines between work and life easily blur. In a startup environment, especially if you're one of the key stakeholders, you have a high incentive structure nestling you along. If you succeed and maintain, you'll be financially rewarded and secured. You could even become very rich.

Research on the other hand often doesn't have this same incentive. If I succeed, it just means I might get another grant or make another funding cycle on what I'm already working on. It means I'll have income/"a job"--the incentive is more of a disincentive: you won't be scrambling to find a job or in a financially unstable predicament. Maybe you get partial ownership of a patent or royalties through your employer, maybe all you get it a meaningless accomplishment award or something.

So while this connection is similar, it's often not the same. This is why I advise most people I speak with to absolutely not pursue research work unless it's their passion they need. I have no problem "turning off" work. I can very very easily separate problem solving or "lab-like" work the author mentions from my life. With that said, I have the exact same problem the author has. I find myself at dinner thinking through new approaches, playing thought experiments of how to tackle a problem or approach it differently, and so on. Sometimes, not often, it's because the core underlying problem is so intellectually stimulating and interesting to me that I can't help but go through the motions. Then, and only then, am I myself to blame.

Most of the time however, in the research world, you're not working on your passion unless you're at the absolute top of your field and have tremendous tenure. Instead, you're thinking about problems you could get funded for and making sure you can continue to get funded for (hopefully they're kind of close to what you actually wanted to do).

You're sitting around thinking about these things because if you only work on them from 9-5, you absolutely will fail, guaranteed because there are starving post docs that aren't far behind you willing to slave their lives away--research like any passion industry has a highly competitive labor market.

In order to succeed you have to work a significant amount of hours simply thinking and rethinking about approaches to problem, that way when you arrive in the 9-5 case, you have fruitful approaches to get you moving along and meet deadlines. Someone else may promise a similar vein of work for half what you say you can do it for. People promise the moon and deliver a broken pickup truck.

So while I agree with the authors observation, I disagree with the cause. I think in R&D, the underlying problem is how research is funded, conducted, and the unrealistic (I'll say absurd these days) expectations that exist. For startups, there's a reward incentive and I encourage anyone who is interested in R&D who can pursue their research through a business model do so. At least then if and when you succeed with the tremendous effort, you'll be rewarded vs skate by.

Research environments used to acknowledge these shortcomings and provide stability and understanding that the process is inherently high risk and the tradeoff you made was you got to pursue your interest but could still be financially stable--you won't be rich but you'll have reasonable work life balance, someone else might get rich, they might also lose boatloads of money--they play the reward/risk game and you do the interesting work. If one approach failed, here's why, and that's OK, come in tomorrow and we'll try something different. You won't need to look for a new position or end up starving on the streets. Now, business has influenced R&D so much that it often is treated exactly like a startup in terms of risk but with limited reward, so you're better off just tell them to stuff it and at least have a potential reward with your risk.