Success and Suffering

One of the most bizarre truths I’ve encountered in my work as a coach is the high correlation between success and misery. 

Like many people, I assumed that people who do well by society’s standards – those so-called “high achievers” – would be so stoked with their wins and constant improvement that they would be basically happy all the time. 

It appears the opposite is more likely to be true.

Ironically, being a high achiever myself, I somehow overlooked the fact that I spent most of my time anxious, stressed or bored.

Sure, high achievers put on a brave face. They give the appearance of enjoying their lives. But pay closer attention and you’ll often find they’re not doing so well internally.

Appearances Are Deceiving

Either they brag, show off, and clearly seek approval and validation for their success. This obviously shows they are insecure and needy for rewards from outside themselves to fill a bottomless hole inside their psyche. As the saying goes, a rich guy doesn’t need to tell you he’s rich.

Or with others, if you get to know them better, you’ll see the opposite. You’ll notice they struggle to accept compliments or acknowledge their wins without criticizing themselves. They downplay their successes as luck, or try to convince you things are not as good as they appear to be. They hold onto negative feedback far more than positive feedback, and seem to be ridden with self-doubt that doesn’t make sense with their proven track history. They’ll even apologise for succeeding.

Simply put, they seem to be way too miserable for someone who’s doing so well.

Why?

There are many reasons for this. Ambition is a sign of a scarcity mindset, of never being able to feel satisfied with the ways things are. Achieving external success for validation is highly attractive to certain insecure personalities. Most high achievers experienced a childhood where they were pressured to succeed and never felt good enough. The list goes on.

But of these causes, I’ve noticed an odd belief that keeps coming up most frequently with my clients.

One client calls it “divine justice”.

It’s the belief that if you do TOO well, and enjoy yourself TOO much, it will ALL BE TAKEN AWAY.

Like the sword of Damocles hanging over their heads, these high achievers fear that doing well somehow provokes a negative reaction from the universe. It’s a mystical and superstitious paranoia that they are being watched by some judgmental entity, and they will be punished if they start getting too far ahead of everyone else.

I have observed a few main causes for the formation of this belief.

One is that all success was met with criticism when they were younger. Whenever they completed a task, the reaction from parents or authority figures or peers was negative rather than positive, like being told they should have run faster even after winning the race. This creates an “I can’t win” hopelessness, where succeeding actually causes pain, so it becomes something to fear. And they’ve continued this trend towards themselves as adults – they tend to find fault with anything they achieve.

Often, as a kid and then later a worker, success simply meant more pressure, responsibility and work. Most school systems essentially punish high achievers by pushing them harder, giving them more tasks, and alienating them from their peers. Parents often also respond to high academic and sporting achievement with higher expectations and demands. Again, success leads to increased pain. And because the stakes keep rising, it’s only a matter of time before you start to fail.

Strangely, kids that were pressured to succeed were often also subjected to contradictory negative beliefs about how successful people are “arrogant” or somehow responsible for causing harm to less successful people, e.g. a kid being made to study hard for a good job while being told that rich people are evil. So being pushed to succeed is like being walked toward the edge of a cliff – if they do succeed, they’re now one of the bad guys. Again, they can’t win.

For some reason I can’t quite fathom, many of them form a specific superstitious belief that it’s all going to be taken away someday. My hypothesis is this belief is a simplification of the complex connections between success and pain. The idea forms that they will be punished for succeeding, and it becomes a belief about being watched, judged, and eventually executed for committing the crime of high achievement.

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The Dilemma… And The Solution

This success = pain formula causes high achievers to have a serious dilemma. Their skills, talents, passion, conditioning, programming, ambition, and conscientiousness prevents them from performing poorly, so they are somewhat forced by their very nature to keep succeeding. They simply can’t stop themselves from doing well. How are they to stop this from leading to total collapse?

Given enough time, they stumble upon a “solution” to this dilemma:

Success doesn’t “count” if you’re not happy about it!

They find that if they suffer and fail and make mistakes, people seem to forgive them for their achievements. So long as they don’t enjoy their lives too much, and have a lot of emotional pain, they’re free to keep making progress and even outdoing their peers and competitors.

They have a few ways of creating this combination of success and misery.

The best one is self-sabotage. They find an acceptable failure rate that allows for lots of success with just the right amount of pain. Think of celebrities who get into marriage scandals. Think of top athletes who struggle with drug abuse. I have one client who’s somehow about 15 minutes late to just about everything, despite being a successful businessman, gymnast and Casanova.

Procrastination is another great tactic. I used to leave my assignments until the last minute when I was at University. I’d still get them done, and still get a B+ or an A, but that lack of effort ensured I rarely got an A+ even though I was fully capable. Leaving everything until it’s urgent ensures the high achiever under-delivers just a bit, as well as always feeling worried, stress and busy.

There are many other ways to keep the top level of performance just out of reach. Bad relationships with toxic lovers and friends. Over-spending or ignoring finances. Bingeing on food or social media late at night. Shiny Object Syndrome (impulsively diving deep into any new idea that pops into your mind). Perfectionism, which is really just doing a lot of things to a mediocre standard rather than focusing on what matters.

The Result

All of these tactics serve a single purpose: they cause emotional suffering.

Stress. Burnout. Chronic anxiety. The “I’m not good enough” story. Scattered thinking. Difficulty sleeping. Physical health problems. Relationship breakdowns. Too many small issues to deal with at once.

The high achiever can then indulge in a subtle form of complaining – what I’d call “suffer-signalling” – where they carefully allow others (and perhaps God) to see that they’re miserable. Sure, they are outperforming most people on a consistent basis, but they are hurting as well, so it doesn’t “count”.

I think for many it’s all about the fear of social ostracism. High achievers are rare and so by their nature fall outside of “fitting in”.

I was placed in the “brainy” class at high school, and felt a lot of pressure to downplay this to my friends in the “lower” classes. It’s like the school was trying to isolate me or get me bullied. So I dumbed it down, cracked as many fart jokes as possible, spoke with less syllables, pretended to like rugby and fast cars – anything that made me seem normal despite my high IQ and academic prowess.

Another client of mine is wealthier than his neighbours; in a big way. Some of them are fairly open with their resentment about this. He feels compelled to pay for group events and tries to avoid any discussions about money so that he won’t twist the knife into their poorness. If conversations come up that he can’t avoid, he downplays his success and highlights or even exaggerates his failures.

The Great Delusion

While it may be a mystery as to how someone can form the belief “If I enjoy my success it will all be taken away”, one thing’s for sure: it’s delusional.

There is no rational reason to believe that enjoying your life leads to disaster. Indeed, any research into this often shows that people who are relaxed and enjoying themselves tend to significantly outperform people who are stressed and serious, and enjoy better long term results as a consequence.

And the idea that you need to be miserable to fit in with your peer group just clearly shows that you need to find a better peer group. Healthy friends would celebrate your success and want to learn from you.

When I discuss this with my clients, they often easily accept this belief is a fallacy. Yet they find it compelling and strangely difficult to let go of. It’s like showing someone the illogicality of believing in the tooth fairy, and they agree with you, and yet the next morning they’re checking under their pillow for money again.

We humans have a tendency to cling to beliefs that serve a useful purpose, even when we know these beliefs to be untrue. Many anthropologists and neuroscientists would probably agree that we willingly believe in lies in order to make functional gains. 

For example, we rationally know not all snakes are venomous, but having a general fear of all snakes seems helpful when we aren’t snake experts. So we act like they’re all dangerous in order to avoid a few. The mystery is why we continue acting as if all snakes are dangerous when we know with a single YouTube video we could probably learn to distinguish venomous from harmless. It’s like we don’t want to know. We don’t want to get smarter. We’d rather just be afraid.

High achievers seem quite reluctant to challenge the claim that they must make themselves suffer. When this belief is challenged, my clients’ eyes glaze over as they struggle to stay present and address the issue. It’s like some part of them is threatened by the conversation and doesn’t want to go further.

Guilt Trip

If I had to guess, I think it’s some kind of guilt around unfairness.

If they were to fully embrace their advantages, strengths and successes, and actually enjoy their achievements, they’d be consumed by guilt. This separates what I’d call decent high-achievers from more psychopathic high-achievers. The psychopathic types don’t have this problem of self-sabotage – they just go from win to win without slowing down – because they aren’t worried about hurting others.

Strangely enough, it seems empathy is the problem!

We care so much about others, and we understand that on some level our success has a lot to do with good luck. We almost feel like we’re somehow participating in the bullying or rejection of others by embracing the lucky hand we were dealt, whether that’s parental support, high IQ, street smarts cleverness, courage, resourcefulness, or a well-timed exploitation of an opportunity. We think our success either takes away opportunities for others, or it highlights their lack of success and makes them feel inferior.

We feel like we owe suffering in order to make things fair for others.

What is Fair?

There are problems with this variation of “empathy”. 

We do actually genuinely suffer from life. We still have family members die. We still get sick and suffer injuries. We are still at risk of financial collapse. We still get divorced and have our hearts broken. So the idea that we’re suffering less than “low achievers” isn’t necessarily true. The fact is, less success comes with less responsibility, and all decisions are lower stakes when you aren’t expected to do well. 

Added to that, suffering is all relative. You would judge as doing “worse” than you, but if you were to experience their mind you might discover they’re having a better time than you. Maybe this so-called empathy you’re having is a form of unfair judgment. Maybe you’re not as psychologically successful as you are materially successful. Some studies claim that ambition is highly correlated to childhood trauma, so perhaps our drive to succeed is evidence that we’ve been in pain this whole time.

I know that high IQ correlates highly with depression; basically the smarter you are, the harder it is to be happy. So is it really an advantage to be genetically gifted? Where does the term “ignorance is bliss” derive from? One of the reasons I used to be addicted to weed is it dumbed down my thoughts, which instantly made life more enjoyable for me. Does being smart make me “better” than others if it makes my inner experience worse?

And, I think most importantly, no one actually gains from us hurting ourselves. If being successful is good luck that we didn’t deserve, then it makes sense morally to balance the scales, but shouldn’t that come from sharing the success rather than sabotaging it? Would it not make more sense to do really well financially and then teach others how to do it, rather than screwing up your finances to reduce your profits?

A Better Way to Look At It

Here’s what makes sense to me: being successful is a mixed blessing and curse. 

Being a high achiever is not really a choice. Your genetics combined with your trauma, upbringing and luck factors have led you to be this way. It causes you both pleasure and pain. Every upside comes with a downside. You simply have different problems than people who achieve less.

You’ve already paid your dues. No one is coming to take it all away… or if they are, it will happen regardless of whether you also sabotage yourself. Bad shit will happen to you no matter what.

The best and most sensible solution is to try your very best to enjoy life as much as possible, and share this with others whenever you figure out something that works. That way, even if you didn’t “deserve” it, you’ve made up for it by spreading it around. Everybody wins.

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