Letting go of achievement culture

There is no top. So stop trying to get there.

Photo: Jorge

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I am currently working on a New York Times Book Review essay about achievement culture as manifested in divorce memoirs. I am very invested in it. It is thorny and tricky and tender and might get me absolutely excoriated by The Culture or might be something that makes you stand up and shout “YES!” and slam your fist on the kitchen table. 

I am making a rather difficult but hopefully delicate argument about how our culture celebrates female achievement: how we love the women who escape the confines of marriage and motherhood in order to write the bestsellers, in order to soar in the realms of traditionally male status, without considering how this limited view of liberation and accomplishment reinforces societal assumptions about what doesn’t matter. I don’t want to get too far into it here, just to dangle a little spoiler for you all and talk about the behind the scenes of writing and editing it.

So here I am, spending my afternoon trying to explain how achievement culture snakes through these women’s stories without seeming like a 1950s housewife telling women to simply stay home and craft daffodil bouquets, and it’s very enjoyable. And when I am done, when swim practice is over and I have to close my laptop and go read a graphic novel about rebellious guinea pigs to Elena, I am a little bit resentful. I want more. I want to keep doing this work. I want to achieve. 

The idea of “achievement culture” came to me as I was writing last week’s essay on setting out to achieve in the grand I Am Meaningful And Have Status tradition in which I grew up, then realizing, several days and a giant stack of books and expectations in, that I no longer believe in the whole enterprise.

I, sadly, do not get to coin the term “achievement culture.” It’s in the title of a 2023 book by journalist Jennifer Breheny Wallace entitled Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic.

Wallace argues that students today are suffering from unprecedented mental health crises in large part because the pressure to achieve – in grades, sports, extracurriculars, college admissions, internships, awards, etc etc – has become so intense and all-consuming. She cites an alarming 2019 report from the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine that designated children in the top 20-25% of incomes nationwide who were attending competitive schools as an “at-risk” group, with similar risks for depression, anxiety, and mental health disorders as kids living in poverty, kids in foster care, recent immigrant kids, and kids with incarcerated parents.

A 2018 report from the Robert Wood Johnson foundation, meanwhile, cited the top four conditions affecting the well-being of adolescents: poverty, trauma, discrimination, and “excessive pressure to excel.”

The causes of this pressure are familiar ones we’ve probably all heard a dozen (a hundred?) times at this point, which says something in and of itself: the increased competition is crushing kids (students now must have a minimum number of APs to even be considered by certain colleges; extracurriculars are no longer optional but mandatory; resume building begins in middle school); the uncertain nature of the economy and decline of reliable well-paying jobs makes parents and students feel they must do everything they can to guarantee success; the squeeze on the middle class means no one dares to take a day off or to give up the math tutoring or the volleyball practice or the debate team. 

These are trends that have been in play for at least a decade now, cataloged by Jennifer Senior in 2012’s All Joy and No Fun and by William Deresiewicz in 2014’s Excellent Sheep. Deresiewicz described an epidemic of “credentialism,” in which “the purpose of life becomes the accumulation of gold stars.” Almost a full decade before Nathan Heller’s polarizing and gut-punching New Yorker article “The End of the English Major,” Deresiewicz was citing statistics showing economics as the new favored major of undergrads, and finance and consulting as the two most popular career tracks.

This myopia has only intensified. Deresiewicz was drawing on data from the early 2000s, before the tech boom: now, tech, STEM, and economics vie for the top spots, with the humanities hemorrhaging more promising young people than ever, and whole departments devoted to such useless esoterica as reading shutting down entirely. 

“What, finally, is it all for? Our glittering system of elite higher education: students kill themselves getting into it, parents kill themselves to pay for it, and always for the opportunities it opens up. But what of all the opportunities it closes down–not for any practical reason, but just because of how it smothers you with expectations?” 

The opportunities it closes down are the ones that don’t count as achievement: the ones that don’t come with status, that may not come with financial rewards, that may be almost completely invisible to the culture – like, say, birthing a child, or learning how to comport oneself in an argument, or dedicating oneself to a daily practice, or creating art, or building furniture, or writing sermons, or farming or sailing or nurturing a community. 

So – I wake up and I just want to work on this NYT essay. Then, I want to work on this newsletter. I want to read and take notes on my giant stack of homeschool books. Running, I listen to Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space” and suddenly I can envision myself achieving, again: there I am on NPR, saying, “Well, Terry, I first started thinking about this when…” There I am getting the status, the accolades, watching the path to achievement light up again before me. 

But now, I can reflect a little. I remember how it felt the first time, when Elena went to school. I remember how glorious it felt to work all freaking day. I remember doing interviews and then researching and reading and taking notes and writing.

And I also remember the disconnect picking Elena up, the feeling of a radical whiplash switching between personas, the constant wanting to be doing more of this achievement work even when I was doing so much, and the mild ache and unease behind that desire.

I remember, too, the waking up during COVID and realizing that all that achievement didn’t mean so much. That I wasn’t sure what actual ballast I had in my life, besides wanting to be recognized as important – as someone who’d achieved.

Was the achievement fun? Was it fun to fantasize about while running to Taylor Swift (or, at that time, Katy Perry)? Absolutely. Was it great fun to get some gold stars and have my book on a banner in Times Square? For sure, even if the world seemed like it might end at that particular moment.

But what I know now is that there is a twist afterwards: that achieving is always followed, at some point, by not achieving, and the more you want that achievement, the harder you cling to it and pursue it, the more single-minded you are, the more punishing and brutal that twist will be. 

That return to the everyday after achieving – the garden, bobbing lightly in spring wind; dinner sitting on the table; your child asking you to play babies – can feel almost unbearable. Then comes the guilt: the sense that you’ve missed all this because of a bloodlust for achievement. “Thank you Terry, it’s really such an honor…” The sense that you’ve committed to the wrong thing, the thing that’ll turn to dust so quickly you won’t even understand how you wanted it so badly. 

Elena likes to play a game show she calls “DO YOU KNOW YOUR KID!!!” (You have to announce it like that, with three exclamation points.) In the manner of children with excruciating emotional radar and thematic precision, she has chosen the most on-the-nose way of asking us what we are truly committed to. “DOES ELENA PREFER TURQUOISE OR HOT PINK!” she shouts in all caps. “WHAT IS ELENA’S FAVORITE SEA ANIMAL!”

I think of this game when I feel that wanting. I do want to work on this essay for the New York Times. I love this work, and I believe it matters. But I don’t want to want it so hard. To need it like I used to. To cling to it. Look at what I did. Look at who I am. 

Instead, I look at what I achieved the other evening. Elena was shouting at me that I was dumb, an idiot, a horrible mother, because she was so unbelievably exhausted and needed to go to bed at 11:15 pm after a women’s basketball game.

A few years ago, I might have shouted back, you do not speak to me like that, I might have given her a consequence, I would have felt desperate and furious and outraged and wounded. This time, I just stood still. It’s time for bed, I said. And she cried and came upstairs with me. 

I didn’t realize the enormity of the achievement until the next day. And I would definitely be lying if I said it mattered as much as, say, winning a National Book Award. But I want it to matter as much, and I am trying to arrange my life accordingly, because I see how limited the path of achievement is. How it can only ever lead to more achievement and more and more, and your child’s face recedes, recedes, and your happiness depends entirely on the whims of people with more status, more achievement, than you. 

So I have to choose to say, hello, wanting. I see you. I recognize you. And I will savor you later this afternoon from 3-8 pm while my child does Girls on the Run and goes to swim practice, and until then, I’m present here, in my life. This one life. This moment. This is enough, because its mine, because I love and notice it, I claim it with my whole heart even if it never ends up on Fresh Air, even if it never earns me bedazzlement at a cocktail party, I claim it stars or no stars, money or no money, fame or no fame. 

“With status,” William Deresiewicz writes, “you can never have enough. It is comparative, and competitive, by its very nature. It doesn’t just not make you happy: it actively makes you unhappy. You want to make it to the top? There is no top. However high you climb, there is always somebody above you. Mailer wanted to be Hemingway, Hemingway wanted to be Joyce, and Joyce was painfully aware he’d never be another Shakespeare. And so it goes in every field. I can tell you right now where you’re going to end up: somewhere in the middle, with the rest of us. Does it really matter exactly where?”

How incredibly disheartening! How dull! How tame! What about grit! What about potential! What about fail bigger! What about growth mindset! What about…

Enough? 

Just enough? 

Enough to find joy and meaning (and financial stability) in your work? 

Acceptance of wherever you are, right now? 

Enough to create a meaningful life that in one year, five years, ten years, if and when you have failed hard and lost all your status, if and when you no longer believe in much that the culture values, if and when many accomplishments have come and gone, you are deeply proud to have made for yourself, your family, your loved ones?

Enough, my friends. If that’s all you take away, today, take that enough, and celebrate it. 

You’ve already got it, all wrapped up like a fiddlehead fern in your warm palm, right now.