I don't understand why anyone would want to publish anything, but perhaps that's because I don't need a "reputation".

I also don't understand why anyone would ever want to get a PhD, which is just a manner of exchanging almost free labor for a nearly worthless piece of paper. It's like a participation trophy at this point for people that are not homo economici.

I am doing a PhD (by publication, self-funded) because I want to improve how we are decarbonising home heating in the UK, and one target audience is academics, and those papers also support communications with policy makers and industry. As I have made clear to my supervisors the PhD would be a nice bauble side-effect of this climate fixing work.

> I don't understand why anyone would want to publish anything

Why do research if you don't publish it? It's like running a farm and letting the food rot in the fields every year, nobody eating it. The value of knowledge is sharing it with others.

In a history of technology and science I read, the author pointed out that likely there have been many discoveries that, because they weren't shared outside the village, are lost to time (including because of a lack of widespread literacy). You might add the arts to that - how many great stories were lost?