A pathology of striving

I. The striver

You're a teenager. You don't know what to do with your life, but you're smart and ambitious and so you look around. Who seems successful? Who seems happy? Who is respected? Who is loved? Powerful institutions create attractive ladders: elite universities, venture capital, Silicon Valley, Washington DC.

So smart and ambitious high school students spend four years of their lives grinding in hopes of admission to an elite college. They climb hierarchies, run the debate circuit, spend no time with friends. They crush themselves into a soulless husk squeezing out one more math competition problem. To be the best at a thing that means nothing to them. They watch admissions reactions and college admissions how-tos. They read sample essays. No slack. No love in their life, just grind, just grind, just grind. HYPSM. HYPSM. HYPSM. They just want to go to an Ivy+. They just want to be respected. They just want to be proud of themselves. They just want their parents to be proud of them.

Smart and ambitious college students spend years of their lives grinding on a startup, building a product that will make the world worse. Their soul resides in leetcode exercises, quant interview questions, GitHub commits and Hacker News articles. They just want to be a founder. They just want to fit in with the techbros. They just want to make enough money, they just want to be happy. And then they wonder why they don't.

They hate their lives. They are miserable. Because it is not their love that they are chasing, but someone else's.

This is what it means to be a striver. To be "smart" and "ambitious" and to sacrifice your only lifetime to an altar someone else constructed — to chase an illusion, just because someone with money or status or power made it seem like they'd give you a millionth of the validation you want. Half the college students are depressed, and so are half the founders.

I'm a week into my life at Stanford; I'm 18 years into my life in San Francisco. The words Jane Street intern and Y Combinator startup and OpenAI are spoken with bated breath, and that feeling that I get when I hear them is just so empty. I kept wondering why I didn't want to chase after my goals — why I hadn't dropped out of high school to work on my own projects, or get a job in a lab. Why I wasn't taking investor calls in my bathroom or saving companies millions with open-source projects. I kept wondering what was wrong with me — is it my executive function? Am I just not smart enough? Am I not getting enough sleep, not motivated enough, do I have a disorder?

No, it was that I didn't fucking care. I don't want to live in that world. And it is pathological to live your life out of alignment with yourself — to saturate your simplicity with someone else's dreams. I never wanted the things I thought I wanted. And it's surprisingly easy to deceive yourself, especially when you're a "smart" and "ambitious" high school student. What I want is to love, to be loved, and to leave something beautiful behind — to contribute to the human project.

Your ladder is not one I want to climb.

II. Social striving

You can find myriad rabbit holes to fall down — college admissions, quant trading, math competitions, tech companies, high school debate, venture capital/startups, AI Alignment (with caveats), academia. Basically any culture embedded in an influential institution or part of society will create strivers.

I said earlier that powerful institutions create attractive ladders — they do it on purpose. The people at the top of those institutions want a fresh supply of young, capable people who think they know what they want, because that's what makes those at the top rich; they therefore market themselves culturally.

But it's not just a top-down culture: striving is derived from fear and uncertainty, and feeds on the sense that you're behind. When you see people you consider to be friends getting into it, you'll get into it too. Social media is a striver's paradise, and a healthy person's hellhole. People give each other bad advice (some make money off of it, even) and everyone is constantly trying to sell you on the idea that they're worth caring about, because they just want to be loved. Then there are people there trying to sell you on their ladders who absolutely do not care about whether you're happy or not.

Social media brings out the worst of the striver's impulses: you put your status signals in your bio. Your ladder higher-ups can see that you're a budding talent, and everyone else can see that they're inferior. You tweet to promote your projects, or post photos of your exciting new opportunity that you're "so grateful and lucky to have received."

Algorithmic social media refracts everyone's status anxiety, bouncing it around and concentrating it into a massive blinding beam of bullshit that blinds people to their own love, to the love that surrounds them, to the things they care about; it instrumentalizes your intrinsic interests, invalidates your confidence, perpetuates your duck syndrome.

Do we need to live this way?

III. Striving doesn't even work

The funny thing about being a striver is that it doesn't even work. When you pursue things you don't love — out of fear, status anxiety, desire for acceptance, or any other reason — you burn out; you leave yourself passionless and going through the motions.

When you spend four years of your life in high school building a resume of things you don't care about for college, it shows that you don't care about them when you write about them. The longer you spend building a company doing something that you don't really care about, the more you lose the ability to keep putting in more of your time and thought. You get a CS degree you don't want, grind Leetcode problems you hate thinking they'll make you employable, and then bomb the interview because you hate doing everything they're testing you on.

Statistically, there will be people who break through. There will be strivers who succeed. But even when they succeed, they will not be happy, because it is not Success that makes you happy. Big-S Success — being a "successful person," having successful projects or publications or influence or money. How many times does everyone have to say it until we'll learn? Success does not make you happy. Success does not make you happy. It has never been that way. There is no destination, only journey — an endless journey, one that will kill you somewhere along the road, and will only kill you faster the more desperately you chase some end to it.

It's like screaming into the wind, when every cultural and evolutionary pressure yells at you to chase status and power. To want the things that other people want. But you succeed by chasing your own dreams: the things that you love so much you can't bear but to chase after them. The things you can't stop thinking about and coming back to, the things that you're so obsessed with that you can do nothing but work on them. You can be proud of the things you've done, you can live doing things you love, but those are not the same thing as Success.

And if you have nothing like that, keep searching. Don't you dare stop. Keep bumping into the world, fucking around until you find out. Don't you dare climb someone else's ladder. Don't you dare follow someone else's map.

IV. The striver's cure

The striver's cure is just paying attention. When I fell in love for the first time, I learned what it meant to be happy. I realized how much I had been missing.

I started paying attention to the people around me, to myself and what was going on inside me, to their emotions and my own; I learned what it felt like to be myself instead of looking outwards all the time. I learned again what it felt like to feel the breeze, bask in the sun; to be enthralled by music, to cry and laugh and sit there in silence, in the morning, and listen to the birds. And I learned what it felt like to genuinely love things, instead of just reaching for the next rung on a meaningless ladder.

This essay is no criticism of loving math competitions, loving coding problems, of building a startup around an idea that means something to you. It's not a criticism of alignment work (which I regard as important) or wanting to get a good education. And it is never as binary as one makes it out to be; there are elements of joy in every striver, and elements of striver in everyone who loves what they do. Sometimes you do have to do empty work you don't care about.

This essay is a criticism of lying to yourself — about what you care about and what you love. Spend time thinking about it. If you're in the rare position of having freedom and self-determination, how dare you waste it on someone else's dreams!

How dare you let yourself be entrapped by a soulless culture!

There are labor pains, as always, at the birth of new concepts. I'm trying to learn how to live. I still don't know who I want to be or where I want to go; I'm still eighteen. But at least I'm learning where my own love resides. I'm climbing trees instead of ladders. I'll figure it out eventually.