Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

This comic is titled "Academician versus Person from Anywhere Else." An academic complains to a non-academic about the pressure of "publish or perish" -- the well-known expectation in academia that professors must continually publish research papers or risk losing their positions.

The non-academic cheerfully responds that everyone else has a version of that too: it's called "do your job or get fired." The joke deflates the academic's sense of special hardship by pointing out that the basic concept of needing to perform in order to keep your job is universal. Academics sometimes treat "publish or perish" as a uniquely burdensome feature of their profession, when in reality every worker faces some version of the same pressure -- they just don't have a catchy Latin-flavored slogan for it.