So here’s a thing. Let’s call it the “failing to live up to the legend” problem.
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People look around at others and they see high achievers, average folk, and low achievers.
High achievers—they have doctorates or are CEOs, publish a bunch of books or start a bunch of companies, have been on television, often a lot. They are good looking, and if they weren’t born that way, they both have invested in the plastic surgery to overcome it and exhibit enough personal magnetism and brilliance that somehow the ugly would have become beautiful anyway. They earn good money and invariably ooze tons of that “ease” in their social interactions that the scholars of class and class culture, starting with Veblen, either articulate or imply. They get invited to the right parties, attend them, and while there, steal the show. They are always generous and never petty.
Average folk are those that muddle through, paying their bills and doing their jobs, while casting their admiring gaze toward high achievers and wanting to know one or two of them, so that they also have a chance, now and then, to tag along to the right parties, and so that when the going gets tough, they can turn to the high achievers for rescue, whether emotional, economic, or in some other way. They are sometimes generous but sometimes petty.
Low achievers are clueless about the whole affair, and sit around at home eating paste because they can’t go anywhere because their car is up on blocks in their driveway missing four wheels. They are self-destructively self-centered and ignorantly petty.
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This is all fine as far as it goes, but of course it’s as coarse as the imagined low achiever’s grooming skills.
They’re scaffolding to which are attached like accumulations of the best (or, indeed worst) qualities that are associated with human beings in the abstract.
There is a kind of conventional wisdom floating in the air that forgives the low achievers. We understand that we’re meant to realize that we should “look beneath the surface” and that they may actually “surprise us” and that we might find that the poor, toothless guy in the worst house on the block with a rusty Ford Pinto up on blocks actually reads Veblen in his spare time if we would just go over there and talk to him.
And there’s a decent amount of cultural production, canon, and discourse on how it’s okay to be average and how average folk should, frankly, be “kind” to themselves and embrace their perfectly acceptable lives.
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But the high achievers?
The problem with this category is that we don’t have much in the way of narrative around us qualifying or complicating high achiever status. We don’t want it, frankly; humans need their hagiography if they’re to find life to be worth living, particularly among the reflexively-imagined average folk that haven’t yet “given up.” People want people to admire.
But living up to the cultural image of the high achiever is something very few people can do—and as a result, most high achievers tend to feel like failures. Hence the elevated suicide level at top universities, and the way in which people rarely have “just some” plastic surgery, but instead tend to spend their first $10k thinking they just need one or two things only to find ten years later that they’ve spent more on plastic surgery than Cher.
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Here’s how it works out. Maybe you do one thing that’s considered exceptional. You earn a prestigious scholarship. Or you win well-known, high-status award. Or you get admitted to an Ivy. That’s great! It took a great deal of work, much pain, many tears, and not a small amount of luck, but you did it! You have the capability to do a thing that most other people can’t. Note that this last part is the only thing everyone else sees—you can do things they can’t. You are special.
Being a moral and virtuous person, this validation of your talents causes you to try to make the most of them, and thus follow more endless months, maybe years of work, and much more pain and many more tears. Maybe you manage a second thing. Again, only also with the help of lady luck. The second thing, and any others that follow, are murder. With the first thing, you may be a high achiever. With the second thing, you clearly are a high achiever.
And so it is that by virtue of winning the regional the science fair in seventh grade, getting straight ‘A’ grades your senior year, and getting into UCLA (even though you were a bit disappointed, but not everyone can get into Harvard or Yale), you are marked as a “high achiever” by others and ultimately, in part through osmosis, by yourself as well.
Thus you also conceptually inherit a presumed doctorate, a presumed chair in the C-suite, a presumed six or seven book credits, a presumed income of half a million a year, a presumed summer place on the Riviera, and a presumed wealth of social grace and good looks.
Only that is, of course, not what actually happens.
It took you three science fairs of hard toil before you won that regional science fair in seventh grade, you killed yourself getting those straight ‘A’ grades your senior year (and actually it was only possible because you waited to graduate and took a summer class to change that ‘B-‘ in math into an ‘A’) and you were hoping those straight ‘A’ grades would get you somewhere with the ivies, but in the end you had to pull strings with your uncle, who’s a legacy at UCLA, to even get in there.
A doctorate? A chair in the C-suite? Six or seven book credits? Half a million a year? Those are all things that are years, even decades in the making. And you probably couldn’t do all of them even if you spent decades trying. Not to mention you’re still a bit awkward at parties, and you were born with your looks, average as they are, and can’t really afford any plastic surgery.
But that’s not how people imagine you. They imagine you as a high achiever. And, being a person with social genes, even if not social graces, you want to live up to the positive image that people have of you. You adopt and internalize it yourself.
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I’ve lived this life, though the details are different. I have seven book credits. I went to college three years early. I have a doctorate. I’m a VP at a publicly traded company.
Thing is, I’m also a high-school dropout. My first two books were not accepted for publication. None of my books made any money (at all). I did not manage to parlay my doctorate into my desired career as a tenured professor. I have so many student loans that I live day to day and will never pay them off. I’m divorced. I am absolutely terrible at keeping a tidy house and a tidy yard. I’m fattish and average looking. I don’t have all that much social grace. My publicly traded company’s stock is traded on the pink sheets and struggling mightily. And I do not display that upper-crust “ease” in my lifestyle or my social interaction.
But all of this gets lost, forgotten, or ignored. In fact, you’re not even supposed to talk about it. It makes people tremendously uncomfortable.
And yet because I’m a “high achiever,” I get asked for all kinds of things, all the time. People want me to show up for them. They generously beg for “a little of that Aron magic.” Which is fine, and I’m happy to try when I can—but they also expect that when I show up for them, the results will be the results of a high achiever. Even though that doctorate took me twelve years of graduate school, I wrote the books over a decade and only sold a few thousand copies across all of them, and my work experience has been decades of hard-scrabble fighting to prevent startups from failing, rather than sitting in a shiny office at Apple making pronouncements to the New York Times.
The life of so many real-world “high achievers” is a life of repeatedly, even perpetually, disappointing everyone—including yourself—as you try (and repeatedly fail) to live up to the minor-yet-still-insurmountable legend that is, somehow, you.
You want to show up for people, but you also hate to show up for people, because you frankly let them down—and over and over again feel as though you’ve let yourself down as well.
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I’ve lived my entire life this way. Now I’m watching my children live it.
Yes, yes, I know, privilege. We should just be grateful that, etc. And yes, that’s quite true.
But at the same time I’m also compelled to whine that it’s a lot of hard work for a lot of pain to be an actual high-achiever in the real, fallen world, which often just means you’re slightly above average in intelligence at best, and probably simply more bloody-minded and a bit less agile and savvy than “average” folk. You don’t know when to quit, so you don’t, and for these sins you get to wear a merit badge or two, even if they don’t make your life or the lives of others all that much better and may even make them worse.
I recognize the tears, and the tears are real.
I haven’t really figured out how to live with this properly and avoid the inevitable results, like divorce, debt, emotional exhaustion, and fractured friendships.
I hope my kids do.