Is An Overachieving Culture a Bad Thing?

Being neurotic for success has caused so much innovation yet depression…

Our society has a problem: Being so neurotic, that we do not even realize our already existing success.

It’s okay to strive for more even after you achieve success. However, that’s not the case we’re facing. Many of us (including me) don’t even acknowledge what we have already accomplished. We go on bouts of anxiety and depression. We still think we’re failures. Some of us are even willing to sacrifice relationships just to get the next carrot on the treadmill of success.

And I’m going to talk for all of us here and say that, it’s all that we know. It’s all we have been wired to do and to be. Our self-worth is 100% directly tied to our successes. We make ourselves stressed and unhappy. Where’s the dividing line of enough? Because many of us don’t even know when enough is enough.

A lot of us look at the successful entrepreneurs and social media stars, then proceed to think about how much of a failure we are. We desire success like it’s the oxygen we breath. We want to live and be where the success occurs, thinking it’s apart of the formula to success. Even myself for example, never believed in living in any other state besides “top” states like California and New York. Is it actually okay to live in other states? To live in the midwest?

Recently, I was on Reddit, and decided to visit the r/cscareerquestions subreddit. The threads I was viewing were discussing how people (in this case, specifically the thread’s starter (called “OP”, short for original poster)) leave Computer Science college programs and are unemployed for months, if not years. To others this sounds ludicrous. CS majors unemployed?! The one career/industry that significantly beats the national unemployment rate?!

When I was reading these threads, Reddit’s algorithm recommended a new thread. In this new thread, the OP was stating that they were seriously depressed after reading through the subreddit. The OP was scared he was leaving school just to face a life of struggle and unemployment.

This post then stirred a discussion of how the r/cscareerquestions subreddit is basically a College Confidential 2.0 — only people who weren’t succeeding posted. Additionally, it was brought to the forefront that the subreddit has a lot of group-think/herd mentality, and a belief that if you didn’t work for a Big 5 or 10 company (e.g. Google, Facebook, Apple, etc), then you’re an utter failure and that your life will suck from that point on.

Seems like an easy problem to fix right? Just don’t read the information from those communities. However, it’s more to it than that. A lot people have those communities as their only resource in order to see the status of the landscape (in this case, the status of the software dev/tech industry). In this confusing thing called life, those communities are the closest thing to a roadmap. And we consider those roadmaps the sole truth (the subreddit has a pinned post informing people not to commit suicide…so yeah, it’s that big of a problem).

I was recently talking to several friends who come from different backgrounds than myself (read as: they’re not from a high-pressure, overachieving background). One of them said that he (and several other people) absolutely did not want to work at a top company.

I was astounded. I understood that people want to work for different types of companies based on the stage they’re in, in their life, but for someone to say that they never want work at a company like Google at least once was just plain weird.

In reality, I’ve never truly been around people who did not have internal need for external validation. I thought everyone wanted to work at a top company. I feel that there are so many aspects of life that I didn’t know…while others already knew these facts! Idk, I kind of feel cheated sometimes, or maybe I was too neurotic for success to ever understand it before. Maybe going Georgia Tech kind of ruined me. Who knows…

But even when I achieved a top 5 college, I wanted better. I was partially depressed freshman year, because I wanted to be at the number 1 college.

When I was one of the select few freshmen in college with an internship, I still hated that I didn’t have a top internship…even though I probably had the best internship manager and mentor someone could ever ask for.

Now as I move into top jobs/companies, I still crave for something better…

This has even affected aspects of my life like dating.

I’m now noticing a pattern, and it needs to stop.

Be neurotic about the things you care about, not what society cares about 🙄🙃.

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