Fear and self-loathing mark out the modern elite
Anxiety and overwork have displaced flair and imagination as status symbols for high-achievers
James Marriott
Wednesday September 21 2022, 8.00pm BST, The Times
The masters of the universe are not OK. The Financial Times reveals that, far from the slick, cold-blooded übermenschen of popular myth, our top bankers and lawyers are “insecure overachievers”, driven to their vast successes in international finance by doubt, self-loathing and fear of failure.
The paper has featured testimony from senior partners, chief executives and hedge funders who confess to desolating anxieties that can only be assuaged by “obsessive-compulsive” pursuit of validation through deals, bonuses and promotion. One former investment banker coolly notes that his profession is “well suited to someone who doesn’t have a good sense of self”.
The modern elite is a neurotic elite. From California, the Palo Alto Medical Foundation reports an “epidemic of stress and anxiety” in the highest-paid executives. Another survey finds that by their third year in the industry almost half of Wall Street analysts have sought or considered counselling. Similar neuroses are observable across the establishment, from the civil service to the media.
At its punishing extreme, elite education and work breaks the spirit — even the body. Among the wealthiest students in Seoul, rates of premature curvature of the spine have doubled in the past decade. More than two thirds of school leavers in hyper-meritocratic Singapore are myopic. These are not happy children. In Britain, an awareness that there are fewer lifeboats ferrying graduates into the safe harbours of home ownership and middle-class security supplies an extra frisson.
But this is a cultural as much as a psychological theme. “Burnout” and “imposter syndrome” are status-driven disorders of overachievement. At university in the early 2010s I was fascinated by a paradox: quite inconsequential essay deadlines were capable of reducing my contemporaries to sleepless insanity and despairing jags over the library printer even though it was well known that some Oxford humanities courses had gone years without awarding a 2:2.
I think now that I was witnessing the performance of a class behaviour, an unconscious signal of belonging to an elite for whom anxiety is just as much a sign of status as an affectation of louche unconcern was for members of the establishment at the turn of the last century. A teacher friend complains that his highly educated colleagues treat school “like it’s the civil service fast stream”, devising meaningless supplementary jobs, meetings and targets. Part of the reason for becoming a teacher, he’d assumed, was the chance to read a novel under the desk during the longueurs of a Friday afternoon double period. What was going on? Again, the answer may be status. Professional self-esteem requires teaching to feel as much like Goldman Sachs as possible.
The cultivated languor of the Victorian and Edwardian establishments was doomed by the First World War. Similarly, the air of rapacious glamour that high finance acquired in the 1980s has not survived the 2008 crash. But we should not be so naive as to prefer our new establishment of insecure overachievers.
The historian Lennard J Davis has linked the rise of obsessive disorders to the celebration of “precision, repetition, standardisation and mechanisation” in modern industrial societies. Citizens, he suggests, internalise the values their societies exalt. Something similar is true of the neurotic establishment which has internalised the rigid structures that determine its own success: examinations, performance reviews and billable hours. More than one of the FT’s despairing bankers expressed a longing for school, where achievement is precisely calibrated by examiners.
The modern establishment places little value on flair, imagination or higher purpose. Anxiety is a narrowing and conservative emotion. When researchers asked a cohort of elite American students whether they would “be willing to spend 15 hours per week on an intrinsically worthless task in order to gain a career advantage”, the respondents agreed that they would and many “expressed surprise at the question”. The attitude is characteristic. There may be some laboriously greasing the wheels of international finance who believe they are working to a higher purpose, but for many, the pursuit of personal prestige is the point. The Yale professor Daniel Markovits has observed that his elite students are desperate to find “the Harvard of everything”. Which firm is “the Harvard” of management consultancy? Of law?
The connection between narcissism and insecurity is familiar to psychologists. “Insecure overachievers” desire personal glory and achievement to assuage their self-doubt. The late scientist James Lovelock complained that declining research productivity and slowing innovation were the result of ambitious and territorial academics prioritising personal advancement over collaboration and discovery. Science, he lamented, is “no longer motivated by the search for knowledge”. It has become merely a system that enables “different leaders to get their honours”.
Many of the failures of the 21st century are failures of flair: the decline of innovation, an unprecedentedly small-minded and self-serving political class. For an explanation look perhaps to the neurotic rigidity of our new establishment, which has been taught that grinding cheerlessly away towards the next professional trophy is the sum total of the meaning of life.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/fear-and-self-loathing-mark-out-the-modern-elite-dzq6k65pj
James Marriott
Wednesday September 21 2022, 8.00pm BST, The Times
The masters of the universe are not OK. The Financial Times reveals that, far from the slick, cold-blooded übermenschen of popular myth, our top bankers and lawyers are “insecure overachievers”, driven to their vast successes in international finance by doubt, self-loathing and fear of failure.
The paper has featured testimony from senior partners, chief executives and hedge funders who confess to desolating anxieties that can only be assuaged by “obsessive-compulsive” pursuit of validation through deals, bonuses and promotion. One former investment banker coolly notes that his profession is “well suited to someone who doesn’t have a good sense of self”.
The modern elite is a neurotic elite. From California, the Palo Alto Medical Foundation reports an “epidemic of stress and anxiety” in the highest-paid executives. Another survey finds that by their third year in the industry almost half of Wall Street analysts have sought or considered counselling. Similar neuroses are observable across the establishment, from the civil service to the media.
At its punishing extreme, elite education and work breaks the spirit — even the body. Among the wealthiest students in Seoul, rates of premature curvature of the spine have doubled in the past decade. More than two thirds of school leavers in hyper-meritocratic Singapore are myopic. These are not happy children. In Britain, an awareness that there are fewer lifeboats ferrying graduates into the safe harbours of home ownership and middle-class security supplies an extra frisson.
But this is a cultural as much as a psychological theme. “Burnout” and “imposter syndrome” are status-driven disorders of overachievement. At university in the early 2010s I was fascinated by a paradox: quite inconsequential essay deadlines were capable of reducing my contemporaries to sleepless insanity and despairing jags over the library printer even though it was well known that some Oxford humanities courses had gone years without awarding a 2:2.
I think now that I was witnessing the performance of a class behaviour, an unconscious signal of belonging to an elite for whom anxiety is just as much a sign of status as an affectation of louche unconcern was for members of the establishment at the turn of the last century. A teacher friend complains that his highly educated colleagues treat school “like it’s the civil service fast stream”, devising meaningless supplementary jobs, meetings and targets. Part of the reason for becoming a teacher, he’d assumed, was the chance to read a novel under the desk during the longueurs of a Friday afternoon double period. What was going on? Again, the answer may be status. Professional self-esteem requires teaching to feel as much like Goldman Sachs as possible.
The cultivated languor of the Victorian and Edwardian establishments was doomed by the First World War. Similarly, the air of rapacious glamour that high finance acquired in the 1980s has not survived the 2008 crash. But we should not be so naive as to prefer our new establishment of insecure overachievers.
The historian Lennard J Davis has linked the rise of obsessive disorders to the celebration of “precision, repetition, standardisation and mechanisation” in modern industrial societies. Citizens, he suggests, internalise the values their societies exalt. Something similar is true of the neurotic establishment which has internalised the rigid structures that determine its own success: examinations, performance reviews and billable hours. More than one of the FT’s despairing bankers expressed a longing for school, where achievement is precisely calibrated by examiners.
The modern establishment places little value on flair, imagination or higher purpose. Anxiety is a narrowing and conservative emotion. When researchers asked a cohort of elite American students whether they would “be willing to spend 15 hours per week on an intrinsically worthless task in order to gain a career advantage”, the respondents agreed that they would and many “expressed surprise at the question”. The attitude is characteristic. There may be some laboriously greasing the wheels of international finance who believe they are working to a higher purpose, but for many, the pursuit of personal prestige is the point. The Yale professor Daniel Markovits has observed that his elite students are desperate to find “the Harvard of everything”. Which firm is “the Harvard” of management consultancy? Of law?
The connection between narcissism and insecurity is familiar to psychologists. “Insecure overachievers” desire personal glory and achievement to assuage their self-doubt. The late scientist James Lovelock complained that declining research productivity and slowing innovation were the result of ambitious and territorial academics prioritising personal advancement over collaboration and discovery. Science, he lamented, is “no longer motivated by the search for knowledge”. It has become merely a system that enables “different leaders to get their honours”.
Many of the failures of the 21st century are failures of flair: the decline of innovation, an unprecedentedly small-minded and self-serving political class. For an explanation look perhaps to the neurotic rigidity of our new establishment, which has been taught that grinding cheerlessly away towards the next professional trophy is the sum total of the meaning of life.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/fear-and-self-loathing-mark-out-the-modern-elite-dzq6k65pj
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@Olga come, and tell your friends under this article (https://pincong.rocks/article/38073) to do the same
@Olga come, and tell your friends under this article (https://pincong.rocks/article/38073) to do the same
Anxiety and overwork have displaced flair and imagination as status symbols for high-achievers
Last time when "anxiety and overwork" became the status symbol of crumbling Roman imperial elites, northern tribes were working out their muscles and gathering great armies.
