Different people are different.

Nobody should beat themselves up for not publishing a bunch. That is horrible.
However, people should build a realistic understanding of the norms of their field and of their competition. If someone publishes one paper per year and that is all they want to aim for, there is nothing cosmically "wrong" about that approach. Even so, the question becomes: What career do you want to aim for?

Life is a multivariate optimization problem

If someone wants to take sunny days off to hang out in the park with friends, that's cool. If I want to take those same days to write papers, that's also cool. We're allowed to be different. However, when it comes time to compete for a job where writing papers is a major metric of success, I might win that competition and my winning might be reasonable.

Sure, in an idealistic sense, one "shouldn't" have to "give up" sunny days in the park.
One doesn't have to give up sunny days in the park. We each makes trade-offs. Which do you prefer: sunny days or tenure? It is okay for one person to prefer sunny days and another to prefer tenure. Indeed, if someone that prefers sunny days worked as if they preferred tenure, they might have regrets about missing out on sunny days!

Personally, I don't want sunny days in the park.
It is okay to be different.

However, when someone says, "I want both!" or "I shouldn't have to choose", I don't know what they are talking about.
Don't get me wrong: everyone getting both sounds lovely, but what world is that?

Personally, I would love to eat cake and not get fat. Unfortunately, if I say, "I shouldn't have to choose" between cake and weight-management, my "should" doesn't convince reality to change. I do have to choose because I live in reality.

Arguments to "change the system" are also somewhat misplaced.
Why would we change the metrics of success so that more people that work less displace people that want to work more? How does that make sense?

I think we all somewhat wish that we could live in a Star Trek-like post-scarcity society, but we don't. That sucks. That isn't a problem that gets fixed by changing how much focus academia puts on publications, though. That problem is much wider than psychology or academia.

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