Gospel of Stress
Success is Heaven. Failure is Hell.
The people like me are supposed to be living at the top of the world. We’re supposed to have it all – the talent, the opportunity, the success. From the vantage point of the rest of the world, we’re doing great! We’re what everyone else wants to be.
Then why don’t we feel that way? Instead, what we do is stress. Stress, stress, stress. Stress that turns our hair grey. Stress that has us popping pills. Stress that has us climbing and climbing, until the day we drop dead from a heart attack.
We wear the labels with pride. Type-A Overachievers. We love the fact that the rest of the world looks at us as the superhuman forces, who by sheer force of will, achieve the things they want.
Of course, they don’t understand where the will comes from. They don’t realize that it’s not a will born from desire as much as fear. We strive so hard, because we are so afraid to fail.
If Success is our Heaven, Failure is our Hell. It raises us over the clouds of realization, that we are not special or better than others. Thus we are here, not for any special purpose, but to exist for the short period of time granted to us by the Universe.
In the absence of a faith in anything higher or bigger than themselves, my friends are still plagued by the same question that plagues us all: why are we here for such a small time? What is the reason for us to be here? What is our purpose?
Success is a very special type of purpose. It blends our animal desire to have more stuff, more creative contexts, and our evolved, primate desires for social recognition. Success, simply put in the modern world, is the accumulation of material wealth through socially commendable ways.
Take either half away – the material wealth or the social recognition – and Success is half-baked. An illegal weapons dealer can have stupendous amounts of wealth, an artist significant social recognition, but a banker who has earned their money in ways condoned by society has more Success than either. They grace more magazine covers; we talk more about them on TV. They are what overachieving kids want to be. Not criminal kingpins. Not artists. But bankers. Humdrum, boring bankers.
This is not the kind of thing you grow up dreaming about. “I can’t wait till I have a more intimate relationship with Microsoft Excel than I do my own wife,” has been said by exactly no one, ever. No kid talks about becoming a management consultant or a product manager. And yet, our hardest-working, most ambitious, most driven people – they end up doing exactly this. Why?
To understand, you have to get in the mind of someone who grows up with this particular psychology in one particular environment. You have to see what they see, feel what they feel. You have to experience the step by step descent into depression that drives them into the unrelenting clutches of the corporate life. It is not by choice – no! – but by deep psychological need that they willingly turn themselves into the slaves of the system.
The other day, I saw a woman walking down the street talking on the phone. She was going the other way, but I caught a snatch of the conversation enough
to hear her say to someone “They’re all fucking corrupt. Just fucking corrupt.” She was red in the face, like she’d been saying the same thing for hours but the person on the other end just wasn’t getting it.
I used to think these were the sore cries of a loser. A nobody who’d been worn down, and who just lashed out at, at all of it, indiscriminately. Well, I’m one of them now. I get where they’re coming from, and I say many of the same things. This is not a loser talking out of anguish. This is a so-called winner speaking from experience.
The reason these vague generalities get laughed at is the same reason they’re true – they don’t come from the intellect, in refined thoughts and precise words, but from the gut, whose go-to mode of communication is a plaintive wail.
These are not the imprecise thoughts of loonies, but the desperate cries of people in pain. The world is not fair. The game is rigged. And yes, they are all fucking corrupt. I know because I’ve seen.
Why is this something that my friends never saw? Did they not want to see? Or were they just too pre-occupied? When they’re presented with evidence that these cries come from more than just imagined conspiracies, that there is some truth to them, they respond in the same way they’ve always responded. With vague generalities about how everything is OK. How the system works. It might need some tweaks around the corners, but for the most part the engine still works.
They need the system to work because they’ve molded their lives to it. Everything they do comes from it. Their goals. The ways they try to reach them. The objects of their happiness. The purpose of their lives.
When you try to tell them that the system doesn’t work, that it’s actually broke deep at its core, what they hear is an attack on their worldview. This isn’t something they can fathom. It’s not something they can allow. They know nothing else. They are religious zealots who don’t know how to live without their religion.
This ultimately is where the stress comes from. It’s not a fear of poverty or loneliness. It’s the fear of damnation. Of being judged by an external force and found wanting.
Religion is not faith. Faith comes from within, a deeply personal worldview developed through first-hand experience. You can tell people about it, you can describe in detail how it arose and where it comes from, but you can never really quite get anyone else to feel exactly the way you do.
Religion, on the other hand, is all about collective experience. It is an external force, one that inculcates a worldview in its members through nothing short of psychological manipulation. It preys on the human capability – the very good and right capability – for faith, but what it fills that existential hole with is not a personal identity but a collective one.
Religion demands the submission of the individual to the group. To those who do not have faith, this looks like nothing short of psychological slavery. But it is not that simple.
Religion is not necessarily a terrible thing. It presupposes that faith, real faith, is only possible through the power of other like-minded human beings. The collective experiences of a common faith – one born from similar upbringings, reinforced by shared experiences, renewed constantly through the regular practice of rituals – is a very special psychological and spiritual force. Anyone who has ever lost themselves to the crowd – a dance hall, a concert hall, a sports stadium, a speech – who has felt their individual identity melt away momentarily and merge with those around them, has felt the very real power of religion at work.
In that moment, you are very literally not yourself. Your mood shifts with the crowds around you. Your language and motions mirror those around you. You act in ways you did not plan to act, and you find it difficult to stop. Something inside you responds naturally to the sensation of being in a group. Like an antenna resonating with a signal sent to it from the heavens above.
And so the chase begins anew. Another goal, another marker of Success, another high that lasts for just a moment.
It is a vicious cycle; once engaged in, you cannot escape. Especially if your religion isn’t even built on faith.
The only way around this is to believe that some people are worthy of the goal just because of who they are. This is a twisted way to transform some external goal as an internal one. The validation does not come from measuring progress against an external yardstick, but from having some level of blind faith in yourself and your inherent specialness.
This idea that people who achieve their goals do so because they own somehow special traits is called something in the world of child psychology. It’s called a fixed mindset – and it leads to exactly the behavior and anguish felt by the children of the elite.