To some extent, this is common in th west. But why is this so important to not be ordinary ? Why isn't it good enough to be good at something at your friends group, family, etc ?
Knowing all this, how could I throw it all away? I have no delusions of being the next Elon Musk, but I have the opportunity to work myself into the top 10% of what I do. Never mind my own internal drive (I honestly love building things, in general), but to be handed all of that opportunity and just throw it out for a mediocre career doing mediocre things would be a tacit insult to everyone who has less than me; and might do more than me given the same opportunities. Put succinctly, it would be lazy and ungrateful of me to just "settle down".
Granted I started off closer to the top than most, but I imagine many people have a similar ideal relative to their starting point. Just look at immigrant families who arrived with nothing, re-use disposable plastic bags and wear the same t-shirts for years to save for their kids' college, and said kids go on to get get high-paying jobs. Accepting the "ordinary" in that context means the family remains poor.
May I ask, who do you feel obligated to? Your parents or society? Is there really an obligation on you, or are you just taking on the obligation as a way of feeling special? Do you feel that if you don't achieve your "best" that society will suffer?
If I were an ambitious person that I would be begging you to pursue a mediocre career. The fewer "privileged" people at the top, the more room there is for those who have not had such privilege.
What you call a "prison of obligation", I call civic duty, and I happily embrace it. Responsibility is what gives life meaning. It's what serves as a barometer for whether you wasted a day or not. Granted one has to be careful not to take on an inhuman amount of responsibility, that just leads to burnout and health consequences, but it's hardly a "prison". I've always felt good after a week of hard, productive work and empty after a week of Netflix, beer and video games. I can enjoy the latter for a day or two, maybe three, but past that I'm going to look for something more meaningful.
In my case that responsibility, as far as my career is concerned, comes from my family's background. I'm fortunate enough to live in a society, however flawed, where my dad the son of an enlisted Coast Guardsman (although grandpa eventually worked his way up to Warrant Officer 3 over 20 Years) and a stay-at-home mom could work his way into the upper-middle class and provide me with everything he did. Society doesn't do this out of altruism, Western society and Capitalism in general on average reward smart people who work hard precisely so they'll contribute more to society. Granted the system is far from perfect, there's some corruption and society rewards some areas more than others, and the system is having more trouble in recent years than it's had in the past, but the general principle holds true. Conscientious people with high (but not too high) IQs are the most successful demographic: http://www.businessinsider.com/conscientiousness-predicts-su... (some good sources in the article)
To whom much is given much is expected. Imagine our political system gave some people 1 vote and some people 1000 votes. Now 1000 votes typically won't swing a national election, but wouldn't those lucky few with 1000 votes have a greater moral obligation to use them wisely?
So I run on a hybrid of internal passion and external responsibility. Passion comes and goes in waves, often my impetus for starting something, and responsibility fills in the gaps and makes sure I follow through. It's worked pretty well so far.
Also it's hardly a zero-sum game at the top, particularly in engineering. You need look no further than any daily news source to see society crying out for competent individuals from all walks of life.
But ambition for the sake of "being good at something"? Especially when good is compared to other people? as if there's something wrong with being average? That's different.
Despite this narrative arc of the primacy of individuality we still (quite predictably) shun people who manage to actually achieve it and generally celebrate homogeny among our cohort.
I couldn't enumerate the negative effects this inherent contradiction may have produced, but it seems unlikely to be a list of zero length.
Common in the east too. I would imagine this is common to all human(living?) beings.
I had 2 of my classmates commit suicide because they didn't achieve success at engineering entrance exam.
Its one of the most vivid memories I have from my teens. I walked into our hostel and there he was lying in his bed with half eaten apple in his mouth. I think he tried to eat something sweet after downing chemical pesticide.
The average person certainly has a job and can support themselves. Our unemployment is not 50%
The vast majority of people in the US with decent health insurance are not "exceptional overachiever[s]." Heck, I know more than a dozen people who literally sit around and watch TV 16 hours a day and have decent health insurance, including my own father who hasn't been employed in almost 40 years. To do that you just (usually) gotta be married.
An enormous disservice to American school kids for the past forty years has been the ad nauseum repetition that you either graduate college or you’re a failure who’s a complete drain on society. This is bollocks. After training a few years, work in some skilled trades pays six figures. Others are easily making upwards of $70k. If you can’t survive on that, tighten your belt or move to a lower cost-of-living area.
Just like everyone you went to college with wasn’t a fit for med school, not everyone you went to high school is cut out for college. Learning a trade in vocational training may be exactly what they’re looking for and is definitely a path to good jobs. Earning a decent, respectable living is fine and in no way a comment on the person’s character or value or intelligence, but by painting it as “alternative school” with the connotation of a one-way track to Loserville, axe grinders have made the situation far worse.
Now, it’s true that being a fry jockey — or any other job where anyone can walk in off the street and do the same task with little training — is not economically survivable, but a career that peaks at unskilled labor is far worse than ordinary.
However what if you fail at learning 1 or two skilled trades?
Plus even those in skilled trades need to know at least the bare basics of entrepreneurship. The days of cushy union jobs are over.
Not everyone is cut out to be a plumber or bricklayer either.
I live below the poverty line in the United States and my life is great. My health insurance is 100% free and probably the best in the world. I get financial aid from different government sources that give me a comfortable simple life.
The people who feel they need to own cars or houses and have children struggle to meet their personal expectations. Their struggle and wealth subsidies my lifestyle.
I don't consider wealthy people my enemy or "rich fools." Instead I see them as people who psychologically for one reason or another have certain expectations about what life is supposed to be. They wouldn't want my life for free and I wouldn't want their life at a cost. Does my lifestyle carry a social stigma? Of course. But do I really care what someone else thinks when I'm basically allowed to live in a first world country for free? Not even a little bit.
To me this is as fair as you can probably get in an economic system.
I don't value travel enough to change my lifestyle so I wont work toward that end but if you do then you should. I say this with zero judgment or passive aggressive intention.
I contribute to society by making the choices I want and not imposing my expectations of contribution on to others.
The best thing you can do for society is take care of yourself first, because that's what you have the most control over. How justified is much of the debt, guilt and obligation that we feel? I guess most of us believe that if we shirked these things then babies would be abandoned in the streets and all sorts of lawlessness would occur.
Is my lifestyle naive and selfish? Maybe. But I know who I am and I don't have to justify my choices to anyone else. I am not going to make a list of my good deeds to make sure people respect me. What if instead of trying to save the world so you can be happy you chose to be happy and that led to you saving the world? Why do we assume the former is more true than the latter?
It's really hard to talk about these things without coming off as being "holier than thou" but I think they're questions worth asking. They're questions I still ask myself all the time, I don't believe that I've reached some higher plane of enlightenment with all the answers.
People should be allowed to suffer and sacrifice their happiness but they have to want to it can't be imposed on them (consciously or not).
Yes, possibly yes, and no.
The great thing about personal expectations is that they're personal.
I'd argue the choice to have children guarantees you a future benefactor to your retirement plan (planning a life that guarantees you subsidies).
That is really the spirit of my comment.