This sounds unreal. How did your supervisor managed his subordinates so they wound not spend their time in leisure activities?
> However this ends with a considerable cost
I can relate to that. Broken aspirations, depleted ambition and energy and lack of interpersonal relationships sometimes make me feel sad.
Self-pressure? I cannot spend my work time in leisure time, otherwise I ashame. It is pretty even the opposite that I experienced: I felt ashame in my leisure time to not work to get more progress on my phd.
We were only two phd students supervised by the same pair of supervisors. In fact we saw our supervisors a lot. However this was more in a friend way. Every time we switch to work-related discussions they found excuses to leave or just say that they will take some time later to ask our questions / reveiw our drafts (and this never happen).
In the case of the other student, he was more lucky and find an unofficial supervisor that help him a lot. I find some support from another researcher at the end of my phd. And thanks to him I had some review of my manuscript. This gave me some confidence to finish the writing.
I guess in your situation the supervisors were present in taking care of your self motivation and checking your commitment to your PhD when having informal conversations. Also, it sounds you were in control of your PhD project and could set up goals and strategy achieving them yourself.
I am curios, in what field did you do your PhD?
They are not there to babysit, and many want self motivated people. If you spend your time doing leisure activities, you will either spend too much time getting the PhD, or simply not get it.
Also, in large enough research groups, the advisor delegates almost everything to postdocs. I knew one guy who, every time he met his advisor, would have to answer the question "So what was your thesis topic again?"
It is though very much opposite of what new PhDs expects judging that from my own experience, conversations and confronting my supervisor who eventually frankly said that “academic freedom is not for PhDs”. This created an environment which reinforced itself.
This made me look PhD as a job which I tried to treat as such looking through cost/benefit lense. Probably, if my supervisor would not keep up with regular meetings I would have done less (after being introduced with concept of “academic freedom” for PhDs).
I would not look in that as lack of self motivation. In contrary at the beginning many PhDs were quite curios on what they do and what happens around them. But by the end of it many my colleagues went away from academia to work it in finance because it pays and frankly many have said that PhD is just a job. Thus I would assert that self motivation does not make PhD thesis alone unless if someone cares about it.
Many (most?) professors in the US are the same. The other kind, though, is not that rare.
I also had the same issue as the author: absent supervisions. I had only two meetings during my phd and they never reviewed my papers (I tried everything to motivate them and I finally gave up). I did everything on my own. It was very hard. I learned the hard way (try and fail... do it again...). I finally finished my phd with great appreciations from the jury. However this ends with a considerable cost: I am completely broken. I now suffer of a severe depression and generalized anxiety disorders. I take several medications and this does not help so much. I lost a lot of friends. My life is basically a journey in hell since several years now.