✨ What we lose when all we do is we win

Broken Promises and Fools Gold: How Achievement Culture Knocks Us Down and Exploitive Companies Swoop in to Save Us

My LinkedIn feed is choked with them.¹ I just logged in for a second, for what reason I’m honestly not sure, and now my chest is swamped with that green, squirming feeling of having accidentally walked into the apartment when your roommate is in the middle of a bad breakup. 

I can’t stop myself. I keep refreshing the page, glued to the screen as the anguish and confusion of thousands of people I have never met organizes itself with a satisfying bounce. Clean white boxes smeared with language so intimate that it triggers my reflex to look away. Grief in reverse chronological order, hashtagged for maximum discoverability.

It goes on for weeks — and then months. For a full year. A cottage industry crops up with recruiters and coaches and industry experts filming webinars on the etiquette of publicly announcing your trauma: we should not treat a LinkedIn post like a journal entry. Show emotion, but be thoughtful because outrage is off-putting and desperation doesn’t sell.

By the end of last year, 262,735 people lost their jobs at companies that have spent decades promising they won’t be evil — encouraging us to bring our whole selves to work and offering lavish benefits and mission statements designed to blur the boundaries between personal and professional life. A tech job could give you so much more than a salary — it could be your community, your mom, your manifest destiny. 

Allison tells you exactly what’s on her mind because what on earth would be the point of talking otherwise? She has a lanky labradoodle who comes to the office with her and a way of talking that’s hopeful, candid and deeply kind. We’re zooming amidst the rippling layoffs in the spring of 2023 and the meandering shutdown of her current company, one of the many pushed over the edge by the run on Silicon Valley Bank.

“When I got out of school, I landed a job at Facebook — I was SO happy.” A smile gently squeezes the tops of her cheeks. 

“This was the dream. It was the next thing on the path. First, you go to Stanford and then it has to be either Facebook or Google. The smartest people go there — you hear about the money, the big name. This is what success is supposed to look like. She pauses.

“I didn’t even know what they did at Facebook.”

She was on The Path. The Path! That mysterious escalator to success and happiness. We talk about it so much it’s become as real as gravity. What are you doing if you’re not on the path? Did you get lost in the void of inconsequential, meaningless work that will fill neither your pockets nor your budding narcissism? No one knows! People who are not on The Path don’t write perfectly balanced humble brags on LinkedIn to tell us how good they’ve got it. 

It takes work to get on The Path, so the earlier you start the better. Malcolm Gladwell’s 2008 book Outliers promised that success was a simple equation of time and effort. The idea that 10,000 hours of relentless devotion to a subject could guarantee superiority added fuel to an already raging forest fire of parents trying to help their children by smothering childhood with STEM clubs and semi-pro sports and volunteer work. Tiger Woods picked up his first golf club at 18 months, so the rest of us better hustle if we want to catch up.

Oscar was four the first time I heard someone ask him what he wants to be when he grows up. All I could think was “he doesn’t know how he wants to spend the next 5 minutes — how is he supposed to know how he wants to spend the next 50 years?” But please don’t ask me how many toys and activities I’ve bought because they’re “educational.” 

Whether we intend to or not, we are handing our obsession with success down to our kids. A 2014 survey by The Harvard Graduate School of Education found that 80% of middle and high schoolers say they believe their parents care more about achievement than caring for others.

We asked youth to rank what was most important to them: achieving at a high level, happiness (feeling good most of the time), or caring for others. Almost 80% of youth picked high achievement or happiness as their top choice, while roughly 20% selected caring for others. Youth also ranked fairness low in relation to several other values. For example, they were far more likely to rank “hard work” above fairness. Some youth made it quite clear to us that their self-interest is paramount: 

“If you are not happy, life is nothing. After that, you want to do well. And after that, expend any excess energy on others.”² 

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Allison was in second grade when her parents put her into advanced math. 

“It was kinda crazy how quickly they did that. And then, ever since that happened, I started to feel like I had to keep it up. I couldn’t regress. I felt like … I grew this reputation. What happens if I don’t keep it up? The achievements felt like ME.”

Her parents weren’t forcing her into any of it, but everything in high school was about how to land this internship or get that job. Little hints were dropped about things she might want to consider for college. Looking back on it, it’s hard to work out how she did it all — the grades, the community service, taking AP Computer Science online at night. She worked at Bloomberg in her senior year of high school and landed an internship at JP Morgan working on a web app for social good. She did everything right, and she was rewarded — first with admission into Stanford, and then with an internship that became a full time job at Facebook.

“I worked there for two years after graduation — it was very difficult. The environment was really bad for me. I have this fear of being worse than other people … it’s something I work on. Anyway, they give you this formula — if you do these things, you’ll achieve these things. But only a small percentage of people will succeed, so you’ve got to be all in. There were weeks where I didn’t go outside for like, four days in a row. You’re always trying to prove yourself.”

For every launch, she spent as much time writing a glow-up as she spent coding: a detailed inventory of numbers she moved and initiatives she led posted publicly for everyone to see. Her manager encouraged it — the visible paper trail made it easier to vouch for her in the next round of perpetual performance reviews.

A clenching fist squeezed tighter.

“What happens if I don’t keep up? I can play out all the worst-case scenarios in my head, and I know I’ll be fine — but if I don’t get the best rating … I have a reaction that’s DIFFICULT to deal with. And — that feeling makes me do things that are good for me — it makes me successful.”

The relentless pace set in second grade was showing no signs of letting up. To stay at the top she had to spend as much time on optics as she spent on objectives. The hum of constant self-promotion in the background reminded her that doing less would mean falling behind. Teammates were both collaborators and rivals — you never knew what was genuine and what was a political move. On one of the darker days, she joined a virtual happy hour organized by a coworker. She signed on, remembering the amazing happy hours they’d had before COVID, hoping it would lift her spirits a bit. As soon as she arrived, her coworker blurted out that he was only doing it to boost his People Axis.

Between 2007 and 2018, the suicide rate for people between the ages of 10 and 24 increased by 60%.³ A 2018 report from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation lists 6 factors that make it harder for adolescents to excel: poverty, past or current trauma, all forms of discrimination, social media/the internet, systems that can lift up or undermine and excessive pressure to excel. 

Pressure to Excel: An environment characterized by extreme pressure to succeed or to outdo everyone else — often, but not exclusively, occurring in affluent communities — can have negative effects such as high levels of stress or alcohol and drug use.⁴

These are the kids with all of the advantages! These are the kids whose parents have the money for the best education, the most impressive afterschool activities, the tutors, the test prep courses — anything to keep their kid on top of the heap. In the research for her book Never Enough⁵, Jennifer Breheny Wallace found parents are loading their kids up with prestigious achievements because they’re afraid if they don’t, their child is at risk of falling through the ever-widening holes in the social safety net.⁶ What would they say if they knew that the resulting hyper-competitive culture pressures kids into lifelong patterns of self-denial, approval seeking and burnout? The quest to guarantee success may secure a job that will impress everyone at the country club, but the kids pay the price. When we implicitly encourage our children to ignore personal fulfillment, caring for others and activities they enjoy in favor of status and achievement, they leave childhood and enter the workforce prone to anxiety, depression and substance abuse without a clue who they are.

“From work to school, nothing really changed. I didn’t have other things that I was like “This makes me happy.” I like to do what I’m good at, and work is what I’m good at. If that’s not true, what am I here for?”

Allison hadn’t had time to pursue things that weren’t on The Path and Facebook was ready for her. Lego rooms and catered lunch, endless snacks, dry cleaning services, massages, a doctor’s office on the main floor, two-week retreats and lavish happy hours, beautiful office spaces — whatever she could need, the company supplied it. After all, the less you need to leave the office to eat, be a good friend, pursue a hobby or help a neighbor, the more time and attention you can give to your Slack messages. Big Tech is even ready to explain the meaning of your life — lofty mission statements and motivational keynotes remind workers that we aren’t just building websites, we’re doing meaningful work that’s changing the world.

I’ve had countless conversations with friends working inside these organizations who tell me that they won’t be exhausted forever because the next promotion or org change or new team will finally fix the stuff that’s burning them out. It’s a little hard right now, but it’s actually a really great job!

For sure, life’s a rollercoaster and work is always at least a little awful. If we can’t suck it up and push through from time to time, well — that’s another kind of hell. But when we’re conditioned from childhood to see every difficulty as a personal problem that can be overcome if we just apply enough effort, we never develop the internal compass that tells us when trying hard is in our best interest and when it’s a trap set to take advantage of our need for approval. We’re relieved instead of skeptical when a company offers to cater to every empty space in our lives. Losing that kind of parasitic job is devastating — you don’t just lose your income, you lose your support system, your place to belong. You can even lose yourself.

Companies do need to pay attention to the well-being of their employees — but that doesn’t mean making the office look like a living room and turning all hands into church. It means fair pay, sufficient staffing and enough emotional distance from work to leave space for the things that actually give us meaning: relationships, community and self-expression.

PS: Allison saved herself — she got a dog, a therapist and a new outlook on work.

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ICYMI

💐 Spring Guide: Links & recs for joyful renewal

1. These phrases are from real posts I documented during the first quarter of Q3 — I have anonymized them for the privacy of the posters. The names are made up and the photos are generated by AI.

2. https://mcc.gse.harvard.edu/reports/children-mean-raise

3. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr69/NVSR-69-11-508.pdf

4. https://mcc.gse.harvard.edu/reports/children-mean-raise

5. https://bookshop.org/p/books/never-enough-how-toxic-achievement-culture-hurts-kids-and-what-we-can-do-about-it-jennifer-breheny-wallace/19248068

6. Let’s be honest, they’re also committed to retaining their own wealth and status by ensuring that their kids don’t screw things up by becoming a lowly postal worker or something.