Ambition as an anxiety disorder | Hacker News Reader

Ambition as an anxiety disorder

moontower.substack.com

216 pointskiyanwang100 comments

I believe that my success can largely be attributed to deep anxiety. I have CPTSD from many terrible years of childhood trauma. As a teenager I struggled with intense depression and hopelessness. Then one day it was like something snapped. I suddenly had a fierce, insatiable drive the lift myself out of the shit situation I was in. I graduated high school a few months later and immediately left home.

Five years later I received my bachelors degree in Computer Science. Now two years after graduation I'm making $300k a year, I'm married, I own a home, and I live thousands of miles away from my abusers yet I still struggle with anxiety and I still feel that drive to be more successful.

I want nothing more than to be able to say that I broke a multi-generation chain of abuse. That I was strong enough to do the thing my abusers couldn't.

I have a similar story, and I'm a bit further along in my career.

- CPTSD [X]

- Ongoing struggles with depression [X]

- Many manifestations of deep anxiety that permeate my daily life [X]

- Unstoppable drive to get myself out of my situation [X]

- Self taught developer and later product manager making SV salary [X]

- Still feeling that drive to be more successful? [ ]

I'm in my mid 30s now, and 3 months into a self-funded sabbatical due to severe burnout. I do think my upbringing helped fuel my professional success, but at least for me, it was not sustainable.

I'm now exploring philosophy and consciousness as a way to change myself, since external things stopped working eventually.

Obviously I'm just a single anecdote, but if there's one thing I'd tell my younger self it'd be to face my demons head-on sooner, and be careful about relying too much on work as a way to channel my anxiety.

The transition to nothingness in my sabbatical was rough at first, but has also been transformative.

I do wonder if someone giving me advice sooner would have helped me avoid the burnout, or if I just had to experience it to really understand.

I’m very similar situations as all of you. However I’m farther behind. The drive to get out of this situation. This drive growing more and more only began in my mid 30s. I’m still looking for my first career dev job while grinding out leetcode.

Your advice to your younger self is spot on. I still have to tell myself that sometimes as I’m not out of the woods yet.

Then posts like this give me a second of pure self pity like I’m too far behind (I know I’m not).

Thanks for your post.

I relate to lots here - especially the unsustainable part.

I’m a few years down the curve, pushing 40, abusive and itinerant childhood surrounded by high status peers, launched into adulthood with a boatload of responsibilities thrust upon me, and scrambled my way up everything that looked like a ladder.

I did my sabbatical six years ago. I didn’t go back. My business, ten years, but enough was enough, it was hollowing me out, and I’d inadvertently created a machine where I could infinitely relive my childhood traumas. It was when I pulverised a telephone at my desk that I realised I was probably done.

I was fortunate enough to cash out with enough to set myself up to put my feet up until the end of civilisation.

I am only now, after six years of… well, different stressors, but at least not ones which just pushed me deeper into a hole… beginning to find some kind of inner peace. Turns out I’ve not known it since infancy. Turns out I’m actually happy being a nobody in the forest. Actually happy.

Nobody ever had any advice for me - it was always up to me to advise others, even when I was drowning - until I finally bit the bullet and started therapy last year. It’s really helped.

I am glad that your story worked out as it did.

For others who might be coming across it, let me provide my story, which pans out very differently.

I was recently diagnosed with CPTSD (but it took a long time for doctors to reach that conclusion), although the anxiety was known for a long time.

Here's how it began: I was close to the end of a prestigious university program (3 years done out of 4) when I "snapped". I suddenly ran out of energy. I could no longer bring myself to care to go to class, and I found great comfort in running away from things. This was the beginning of what would eventually become deeply ingrained avoidant behaviour.

My ambition no longer matched up with the energy I had in my body. It no longer matched up with my ability to tolerate things. I could no longer live up to my ambitions, my dreams, my desires, my goals.

I broke, and I was suicidal for a long time (on and off for 10 years).

I am slowly working my way out of my issues now. I am learning how to deal with deep seated anxiety as a way to give me more energy so that I can achieve my goals. One of my doctors mentioned something crucial: anxiety saps energy. Having an overactive amygdala is harmful, because when you are having a panic attack, your body floods with energy (in order to execute "fight or flight"), but very briefly. The cost of this flood of energy is a massive drop in energy that lasts longer than the flood did. This is a possible explantion (amongst others) behind my perpetual low energy.

For me, part of the process of dealing with anxiety (amongst others, like mindfulness and self-kindness) is learning how to achieve my ambitions by making realistic goals, and learning how to feel pleasure in "small", consistent achievements (the depressed brain is excellent at making every achievement seem worthless). Feeling pleasure in these small achievements is important in order to fuel the necessary consistency of said achievements.

tl;dr: in my experience, anxiety is unlikely to be a driver of achievement, and therefore unlikely to be a cause of productive ambition.

Thanks for sharing your story as well. I mentioned my version of this in a sibling comment, and seem to have experienced some aspects of both experiences, but it took longer for me to snap.

Recovery has been gradual, and I have much work to do, but one thing that I’ve found really helpful is directly examining what it means to be conscious. “Waking up” by Sam Harris was the start of a rabbit hole for me.

This exploration gave me tools to reframe certain experiences as “the contents of consciousness” and helped me start to step outside outside of myself for the first time in my life.

It’s no silver bullet, and YMMV, but I’ve found it incredibly helpful.

> tl;dr: in my experience, anxiety is unlikely to be a driver of achievement, and therefore unlikely to be a cause of productive ambition.

Agreed - the article reminds me a lot of the internet discourse around autism. That community is often dominated by successful, high functioning people with Asperger's/ASD who portray the condition as a fun, often beneficial personality quirk.

This crowds out the voices of people who are less functional, and their caregivers. Classic instance of survivorship bias.

> For me, part of the process of dealing with anxiety (amongst others, like mindfulness and self-kindness) is learning how to achieve my ambitions by making realistic goals, and learning how to feel pleasure in "small", consistent achievements (the depressed brain is excellent at making every achievement seem worthless). Feeling pleasure in these small achievements is important in order to fuel the necessary consistency of said achievements.

I try to stick to this strategy. Often times though, like when I watch an interview of a young(ish) founder of a company or read about a Fields medal winner on Quanta magazine, a cycle of self-pity mixed with self-hate and a strong feeling of worthlessness begins. I begin to day-dream of life trajectories when I wasn't drowned in trauma and was actually able to achieve my potential.

Then it becomes harder to get back to focusing on my smaller objectives as they start to feel mundane. I realize on an intellectual level that these smaller objectives are what will help me in the long run but on an emotional level I feel worthless and leading an inconsequential life.

However, I do thank you for writing up your experience. I feel it will help me re-enforce my strategy and not get caught up in the webs of emotional abuse my inner critic.

Have you heard of post traumatic growth theory? Curious to know if this idea resonates with you.

https://www.apa.org/monitor/2016/11/growth-trauma

I hadn’t heard of it. Interesting stuff. I certainly feel like I experienced dramatic personal growth after leaving home with much of it in the categories that link mentions.

edit you claim $200k per year at a startup, exactly one year ago.. you got a 33 percent raise to $300k per year now in one year.. while working on old games in java too.. hard to believe, really...

Half of that, or more, is likely stock options. It's not unlikely or even particularly remarkable for a large startup to have doubled its valuation since a stock compensation plan started.

It’s $200k base and $100k stock. Indeed at a large startup.

I work as a Site Reliability Engineer. I changed jobs not long ago. The Java game is just a hobby.

Lots of HN posters lie about what they get paid for whatever reason.

Honest question, how do you know they are lying?

I think a lot of success in life is actually turning trauma into a motivating force. That doesn't really help to resolve the trauma, but it does create an illusion of safety you can buy into, often helping to provide a space for processing.

I struggle with just how much traumatic processing is worthwhile. Like if you accept that everyone in life was always doing the best that they could in the moments in which they hurt you or themselves, or you replay the traumatic events and see them through your adult eyes, or if you try to recontextualize them some other way, at what point do you just put down the trauma and live?

Trauma comes in waves. It never really goes away as far as I can tell, you just develop a new relationship to it.

I am reminded continually of Dune.

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

― Frank Herbert, Dune

I am continually reminded that there are deities in the South Eastern religions which have angry forms when they are unfed and benevolent forms when they are fed. The same deity can be a source of fear or a source of power depending on your relationship to it.

A concept I've thought a lot about recently is, instead of turning away from anger and fear, feeding my anger and fear until they are no longer angry gods but instead, benevolent beings who help me to contextualize my reality. I have found it is possible, at least for me, to do this without any outward expression of fear or anger, only inner acceptance that those feelings are real, valid, and not something that serves me at this time.

I'm not sure if these ramblings are helpful, but I hope you find peace on your journey, at least if that's what you're looking for <3.

> A concept I've thought a lot about recently is, instead of turning away from anger and fear, feeding my anger and fear

Some schools of psychological thought say that anger is rarely a primary emotion. It's often a cloak for fear.

>I think a lot of success in life is actually turning trauma into a motivating force. That doesn't really help to resolve the trauma, but it does create an illusion of safety you can buy into

Calling out the illusion ruins it asshole.

For you.

> feeding my anger and fear until they are no longer angry gods but instead, benevolent beings who help me to contextualize my reality

I’ve been reading “Body keeps the score”, and one of the concepts that came up is pretty much this.

Instead of rejecting the self that is “bad” (“I’m always critical and I hate it”), objectively acknowledge that part of self(“There is a part of me that is a critic”). Then, accept/thank that part has been doing that for a reason (“My critical self is trying to stop me from getting hurt”).

Just like you, I’ve found it helpful to looking inward and “thanking” them for protecting me. But gently telling them that it’s not needed anymore.

That feels like a really useful strategy. Thanks for describing it so well.

My inner critic tends to get pretty brutal often.

My father told me that you should never tear yourself down, there are plenty of other people to do that for you.

My advice is to listen to the parts of the critic that serve to improve your ability to heal the world (including yourself) and discard much of the rest.

Spoilers for the game Celeste below:

This has a strong parallel with an important part of the plot.

Over the course of trying to climb the mountain the game is named after, you constantly run into your “dark self” and struggle against it. It insults you and tries to get you to stop give up and go home. At first you run from it, but then you start fighting it until you actually chase it.

Near the end, you have a moment where you learn the “dark self” cares about you deeply and is trying to protect you, albeit in a toxic way. Once you reconcile and work together, letting go of the fear, you finally reach the summit.

Same here, pretty horrible childhood by all accounts.

Aged 20 I decided I was no longer going to let my life path be dictated by anybody else. For better or worse if it all went sideways I would need full control.

Starting a business, being self employed and carving my destiny was the solution to that problem - and I forced it to happen when the odds were not great.

No University degree, no network of wealthy or experienced business minded friends, no business acumen, nothing...just a shed in a garden to work from, a friend who could code much better than I could and the desire to be something other than what I was.

There was a madness within me that I channeled in to working my fucking brains out. I networked my arse off, told everybody I met we could solve their software problems - and the rest is history.

Learning through making mistakes is inefficient and foolhardy but as far as my monkey brain was concerned there was no alternative. Going back to the kid that I was before I was 20 was a fate worse than death.

This is not directed at you specifically, but I am close to someone with CPTSD and they have found Internal Family Systems therapy to be very helpful. Just sharing a keyword in case folks are looking.

Thank you, you're the second person to mention that and it's spurring me on to take a closer look.

Of course. No problem.

If I'm completely honest - some of the ideas came across a touch 'woo woo' at first (which, is probably a "part" as they say), but I believe the core concepts are very useful. I don't have CPTSD, am I still happier for recognizing some particular patterns in my thinking/acting/motivations.

Good luck!

If you'll allow me to be the third, I can strongly recommend the specific IFS book "You Are the One You've Been Waiting For."

It's a short read, and it's heavy on case studies and examples -- which, at least in my experience, are more useful than any sort of prescriptive self-help.

A good IFS resource: https://www.reddit.com/r/InternalFamilySystems/

Maybe your success, and all the repliers', is simply a matter of getting life served on a silver plate e.g. everybody going to university comp science, good backgrounds, getting very good jobs. Of course you can't live with that privilege and have to build a story of being the victim of society.

What? I had very little growing up. When I left home I had one suitcase, a small box, and nothing else. My abusers never gave me anything. I didn’t go straight to university but was instead a transfer student from community college.

Sorry to burst your bubble but I was most certainly a victim of circumstance. I can assure you that as a child I did not put myself in that situation.

I have taught high school English for quite a while. I've taught in poor rural, mixed-income urban and wealthy suburban districts. CPTSD is not a casual thing that comes about due to typical childhood difficulties, and wealthy parents can plow a bunch of resources into raising their kids while simultaneously damaging them in lifelong ways.

I'm sure there's some of that in a society that has turned victimhood into a virtue and a competition.

The reality is that victimhood rarely makes people better, and usually makes them worse humans overall.

The best solution is to stop congratulating people based on how much they have suffered.

I am one of the replies. My parents were poor (they had me when they were both 18), and my father used drugs. He kidnapped me and my brother from my mom when I was 3 and we went on the run. He wasn’t able to keep a job because we kept having to move when the people looking for us got close. My brother and I suffered neglect, and my dad even took out loans using my brothers social security number. He died when I was 15 and I went into a foster home from there. I dropped out of high school and got my GED so I could start working. I was lucky to have found a job at a computer store fixing computers. I managed to parlay that into a career in computers without having to go to college, which I never would have been able to afford anyway.

So unless I’m missing something (please let me know) there was no life served on a silver plate here. We used to get food and second hand clothes donated from churches, but I have to imagine that doesn’t count.

Of course, I wouldn’t recommend to anyone to go through all that to get a career. There wasn’t any “victim dividend” I received (once I started working, nobody really knew my situation at all, much less gave special treatment), and I don’t think it’s a repeatable path to success. At the same time, there are people with similar stories who used that adversity to drive themselves to ensure they don’t go back there. I spend a lot of time now making sure I have stable financial plans A, B, C, and D, and I recognize they are probably overkill. Many people would have probably started coasting some time ago. But I’m too anxious about it to do that, so I keep working on more stability, which to the outside just looks like ambition.

I have a similar story. I would think that it's tied with poverty in many cases (such as mine), and you know what they say, misery loves company.

My pet peeve is being told that I have survivorship bias whenever I try to encourage others to use it as a fuel for good. So now I just shut up and try to ensure that my little ones have their tools to succeed. I'm no longer interested in helping anyone else.

I'm actually to a stage where I'm telling to round out my ambition, trying to figure out how to relax, but I really struggle with not needing to do something.

I have many of those but I don't know about drive. After years of working, studying and trying, I find that I still suck at interviewing and finding high paying jobs. I have been stuck at $50K-$70K/year fluctuations for my entire 15 year career. Reading about people making six figure salaries sometimes ... makes me severely depressed for weeks on end.

But let's not confuse "in spite of" with "because of"

The common narrative i see on comments here is poverty or escaping abuse. I'll throw in my own story -- same narrative -- escaping poverty. We grew up poor, to the extent that we went to bed hungry at times. Thankfully it wasn't so extreme that we were homeless.

There is something worse than poverty though, it is the abusers. People who want to exercise power over you because they see you are vulnerable or because they realize you have few choices. This is worse than the poverty in many ways.

You might typically think this is a pay-day lender, but in my experience it was more subtle -- it was usually a bureaucrat. Sometimes it would be a school administrator refusing to enroll you in a class for no logical reason. A school administrator who didnt want to print your transcript for this reason or that.

Sometimes it would be a doctor's office giving you an urgently needed appointment in 3months, when you know well they have earlier dates. A doctor's office refusing to give you your medical records or trying to charge you money if you want to print your test result. Sometimes it is a hospital refusing to give you a prescription for a generic drug even though that is all your rx plan supports, but you're not allowed to speak to the doctor to change the rx.

It was the system, and it happened all the time.

Being where I am now, I can talk with my wallet. My expensive PPO plan can go to a different doctor. My expensive school district answers parents' emails almost as we're "clients." Heck, if something really bad happened i throw down a hundred dollars and go out-of-pocket on some required medicine. If something really bad happened, i'd find a lawyer and force the bureaucrat to act in a fair manner.

I think there is a lot of PTSD from a childhood spent in this state and those of us who went thru it want to ensure they never ever have to go thru it again, and want to ensure their children dont have to go thru it.

Thankfully, tech in the US gives decent opportunities to up-shift on the economic ladder and the anxiety acts as an accelerant to do so, because you can see the ghosts behind you.

The hard thing is realizing that its all gone and you've already escaped. You're not going to be back in that situation because you're so many rungs past it.

Very similar story here. Growing up poor and unstable drove me to seek more and more stability.

I don’t really get the sense that most ambitious people are similarly driven, I’ve met a lot of people with a lot of motivations. But I’ve definitely met a decent number of people like you and me who grew up poor and are on a life mission to never go back there or let their children experience that.

Really good thread. I saw a lot of different discussions about how folks cope. Was surprised not to see Internal Family Systems discussed. Visualizing a younger version of myself being inside of me reacting and controlling has been very helpful in terms of helping me empathize with the poorly adapted (or adapted to my bad early environment not the real world) parts of myself.

Obviously finding a good therapist has been part of that (I had a fine one for 6 years and switched to a different one {body based} a year or so ago and it's been transformative). The other thing that has helped is couples therapy has been very good as individual therapy. Given how many of our issues are relational, couples therapy is a surprisingly good context for forcing individual growth.

To me, this reads like somebody who's surrounded by successful people who were already so ambitious they have converted their anxieties into more ambition. For every one of these Silicon-Valley-personality-type people, there are tens of others working menial jobs who are not in the 90th+ income-percentile who struggle leaving their house and have panic attacks at their part-time, hourly, no-benefits job who do not have this privilege of "disconnecting for mental clarity" or whatever else this blogger purports as the solution.

There are many better determinants for success than whether somebody has anxiety and is productivity-obsessed. The entire reason anxiety/depression/etc. are classified as disorders is because they disrupt well-being, which in the U.S. is largely measured by "ability to keep working in a job and stay alive". There are plenty of people with these disorders who aren't nearly as successful or ambitious, and plenty of successful and ambitious people who don't have an anxiety disorder. This association lies somewhere on the spectrum between "weird pattern I've noticed in my social bubble and decided is a near-universal law of nature" and "harmful misrepresentation of mental health disorders"

I dont think the author is really proposing a solution. They're just proposing that anxiety and ambition are orthogonal

I don't understand what orthogonal means in this context. I tried googling and failed terribly. Could you ELI5 for me?

If anything, parent comment's usage of orthogonal might've been a typo/mistake. People usually use orthogonal as a metaphorical term to imply "no correlation" [1]. My read of the OP is that anxiety powers others' ambition, that they are portraying the relationship between the two as correlated/causal rather than orthogonal.

edit: to clarify a bit further, I believe the term comes from how vectors that diverge along some dimension form a right angle, rather than a correlation (i.e., if one vector is (0, 5) and the other is (4, 0), they form a right angle )and are orthogonal, meaning "wherever you are on the (4,0) line doesn't correlate with where you are on the (0, 5) line". This might be a bad explanation but it's how I've understood it from working somewhere where coworkers use the term a lot.

[1] See "software engineering" definition here: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/orthogonal

In short orthogonal means independent.

I don’t really agree with the premise here. Some of this boils down to defining terms. What is anxiety and what is ambition?

But on a high level, I’d argue anxiety and ambition are orthogonal.

You can have ambition without having unhealthy levels of anxiety about it. Certainly not to the point of a disorder.

Anxiety can push people to want to succeed. But is that the same as “ambition”?

Where this falls apart is the article implies that medication for anxiety disorders is harmful to humanity as a whole.

I have pretty severe anxiety and none of it helps me. It cripples me. There are things I want to accomplish in my life. I’m trying pretty hard for them, but managing a severe mental illness makes progress towards those goals slow.

Somehow I manage to wake up every day and believe today can be better than yesterday. If not today, then there’s always tomorrow. This never makes me anxious, this brings me relief.

Mental health is tricky because its affects can be so complex depending on factors like personality, genetics, or even other mental health conditions. Something that fuels one person’s drive could incapacitate another, under neither of their own doing.

I think people can have strategies for turning challenges and disabilities into assets, but again it takes the right set of circumstances for that individual. It takes strength to know when your specific circumstances aren’t lining up, and how to reach out for help (community, therapy, medication). And for some people, that condition may switch someday to enabling success rather than hindering.

But to the point of the linked article, it talks about how maybe not needing to strive for overwhelming success in the first place leads to better overall life. How anxiety likely can drive you either up or down, but contentness is maybe in the middle somewhere.

I’ve had this thought before. Robert Herjavec has mentioned on Shark Tank how he “sleeps 4 hours a night because he’s always working”… maybe that’s just how he wants to be seen, but why does he even feel the need to project that image? He must have absurd anxiety, because if not, he would’ve slowed down and been happy with what he has ages ago.

> He must have absurd anxiety, because if not, he would’ve slowed down and been happy with what he has ages ago.

Maybe ambition can create an anxiety if its own. Those who are at the top of their game in the corporate world, in athletics, the arts and entertainment, etc. can be subjected to hyper-competitive environments where they feel the need to continuously deliver, both extrinsically and intrinsically. Maybe they didn’t “have anxiety” prior to it, but they had the personality to thrive within the same sort of uncertain stressful situations.

I want to poke at one thing you said, because it’s relevant to how I see the article. :)

> He must have absurd anxiety…

If the author of the article had said this, I would read it as : “The only way I imagine behaving like he does is to have absurd anxiety.”

I think this is the trap the article falls into.

Many times we lack the information or frame of reference to understand the motivations of other people. When that happens, we tend to use our own experience and motivations instead.

Something I think about a lot when reading these articles because one of the “benefits” of being bipolar is having a very large frame of reference in regards to patterns of thought and emotional extremes.

There's a pretty clear line for me between anxiety and ambition. The difference is my perception of the goal and the theoretical positive benefit I would gain from working through this struggle. Anxiety implies and unknown underlying driver. Ambition implies I understand, to some degree, what I am getting into and am choosing to work through the discomfort anyway.

They are the same thing mechanically, they affect me the same way emotionally as I am going through them. The difference is mostly about how well I could predict and plan for this struggle.

I do understand where you are coming from but would argue that the healthy and unhealthy line you are drawing has more to do with the outcomes you are expecting, rather than the struggle itself. Severe anxiety is a symptom, not necessarily a source of struggle.

I don't know the mechanics of why it works, but my personal experience has taught me that the transition from unhealthy to healthy isn't something I had to put energy into doing. It felt more like a consequence of reframing how I felt the rewards at the end of a struggle. It was difficult at first to separate the anxiety I felt from the negative physical symptoms I associated with it, but once I did, I started to understand what situations triggered them.

Caring intensely about meeting self-defined performance standards made me really anxious about performing or getting reviews about my performance. I also realized that I won't ever stop caring. I don't think any part of me wants to stop caring. But after finding something I felt passionate about, I realized that caring was positive. I feel anxious because I want myself, or something I made, to do well. That realization made me feel relief, and I was able to let go of some of the spirals of negative thinking that I had previously assumed had to be attached to things that make me anxious. I guess you can say it helped attenuate the anxiety to healthy levels.

I think you can agree that anxiety is a symptom and not a direct cause of harmful behavior, medication treating the symptom is at times necessary but if the underlying cause isn't addressed, the anxiety will come back worse. The article seems to be addressing anxiety as closer in intensity to performance anxiety, and the fear of failing, and not crippling anxiety, to the point where it interferes with daily functioning.

The grey area is when you end up in a situation where high-functioning feels like the bare minimum due to ambition. This is why I agree that ambition and anxiety are two sides of the same coin, and the bridge between once side and the other is passion.

I know anxiety isn't nearly as simple or easy to categorize as I am making it sound. It's a very personal and subjective thing, but this is my general take on it.

I don't believe ambition is a disorder, but like most things in medicine and psychology, the definition of disorder is relative. If you have a room full of people that self-select themselves as highly ambitious, certain struggles will be shared and feel natural, even if isolated the same struggles would not seem worthwhile to go through. I say I don't believe it's a disorder, while accepting that I am one of the self-selecting highly ambitious.

Ambition also has nothing to do with execution. Ambition and passion is a signal of how persistent someone will be in pursuing their goals. Anxiety is a product of discomfort and discomfort is inherently tied to growth and ambition.

Not all forms of anxiety are rational or necessary. But I strongly believe that achieving something and realizing your ambition will always involve anxiety.

The deeper question I am still working on figuring out is the relationship between success and passion. Is passion defined by something innate and so someone will put themselves in uncomfortable and anxiety inducing situations in order to be successful? Or is the opposite more likely, where passion is clear only with hindsight and the natural drive to give struggle meaning, causes certain anxieties to be rewarded, and anxiety itself is foundational to being human. As the reflex of fight or flight, and startle response, is built into our biology, I have started believing the latter to be true. The source of passion is most likely a consequence of probability and nurture, not nature.

Being ambitious and continuously increasing expectations for myself means I also see "if not today, then there's always tomorrow" as a source of relief. I would say ambition and anxiety have strong parallels, if not ambition being a subset of anxiety.

This is good insight.

My limit3d understanding of the world showed me a certain close friend as an extremely anxious, borderline narcissist person.

This person has over the years, progressed to a highly sucessful career, broadly admired by peers. But having known the person for years I know whata under the hood and the constant calls let me know about all the deep insecurities that are unfathomable to me.

This person has an attention to detail and focus that I didnt think humanly possible. He will replay every conversation from many angles, looking for clues or things to attach insecurities too.

This person would be a formidable spymaster for any king. Its incredible how much information iteration a person can do with the right incentive (anxiety)

Here is the rub. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What I used to see as a flawed, broken individual, I've come to see as a wonderful example of how nature has a purpose.

You may need to keep your distance from these human steamrollerss, dont get in their path! but dont forget to appreciate the machinery at work. And of course, if there's a path that needs carving..

I would argue that kind of personality is due to the opposite of nature. It was a rewarded behavior that has been nurtured over time to become weaponized, from a certain perspective. Having insecurities is to be human, but anxiety and discomfort has to come from a willingness to endure them. The society around your close friend has rewarded this analytical behavior and so they leaned into it rather than becoming avoidant. My personal belief is that it comes from a place of accepting the behavior objectively and without judgement or negativity. If you spend so much time and energy on just analyzing yourself, you don't have as much room for others and this reflects as a sort of narcissism. But that doesn't actually reflect how much they care about others. Humans have to self regulate their bandwidth for how much external things will affect them. I don't know if it's behavior to be actively avoided, because from their perspective, it's something they feel the opposite of indifferent to. Making decisions from a place of having mapped out most, if not all, possibilities leads to more positive outcomes in the long term. I understand that not everyone will want to spend that kind of energy to guarantee that kind of security in their decisions. Not everyone feels they need that kind of security before making decisions.

I attribute some of my anxieties to my grandparents who always made it seem like there was no middle ground - you were either doing OK or going to be homeless and destitute. If you weren't near the top of your class - well, oh shit, you would be delegated to a low paying, remedial job if any at all. I attribute their behavior to growing poor and going through WW2 in an occupied country as tweens. I don't know why, but I don't resent their behavior, I know they always loved me dearly and were just looking out for me. To this day though, whenever my manager wants to talk to me, I reflexively think to myself, well pack it up kids, we're moving out to under an overpass.

> well pack it up kids, we're moving out to under an overpass.

This gave me a good chuckle, thank you!

It's actually the same for me, only my parents were the cause not theirs and I honestly hate them for it.

parents are people too

As Philip Larkin pointed out.

> It's actually the same for me,

Same anxiety here, even though I'm in my early 40s.

In my case though is not the fault of my parents, but of the general socio-economic conditions back in my adolescence years (the '90s were hell for some of us in Eastern Europe) that saw my family move from middle-class status to almost destitute in just 2-3 years. My dad actually felt (probably still feels) pretty guilty about it all, even though it was not his fault, the socio-economic forces in play were just too great. I just hope I won't pass the same feeling of financial insecurity to my kid(s).

This may be the same sentiment that was illustrated in startup culture as 'default alive or dead'. If you have to spend every day fighting the chaos to be okay, you're going to slip at some point and the wheels will come off.

Depression era people kept reusable things in spades and also cared a lot more about social networks (real social networks) more than anyone since. If you had a streak of good luck you banked some of it with your network, because you never knew when the other shoe might drop and you needed to make withdrawals.

Ambitious and ‘successful’ people (success as seen by the majority of the west - wealth, power etc) seem to almost always be driven by some kind of disorder or emotional imbalance. Hence the chaos of the world - a reflection of its powerful.

That's not the only version of success as understood by the West. There is also scientific success. I think most people would agree that winning the Fields Medal is a great success, not due to the money involved (which isn't little, but neither is it a fortune), but due to the accomplishment. Case in point, most people would say that Grigori Perelman is a successful mathematician: he refused to accept prizes such as the Fields Medal or the Millennium Prize. Similar goes for chess champions, athletics champions, all sorts of sports champions.

I've started describing certain types of traumatic events as 'origin stories' for heroes or villains. Too many doctors have stories of getting into medicine because of a loss. We are trying to play out our childhoods over again hoping that repeating a scene enough times will somehow blot out the one they can't replay. It starts out noble and ends up sounding a lot like illusion of control (which maybe explains why some doctors are so bad at helping people with poorly understood conditions).

Even as a software developer I can see some of that in myself. Almost nobody has a story about someone dying or a loss caused by bad software driving them into the field. I love to make things. I love to feel useful - to the verge of 'mansplaining' according to some. As a kid there were times where I was made to feel like I was just in the way. Clearly that affected me. I've no illusions about that being a coincidence. Any more than I doubt that the uber-successful people didn't have a monologue in their heads at some point that went something like, "One day you'll all be sorry," Jonathan Coulton-style.

It's said nobody gets to be a billionaire without hurting a lot of people. Maybe you do it because you're a sociopath. Maybe you do it because you think it's just balancing out some equation in your head. Or maybe it started out that way and at some point you stopped policing yourself on that because it just made you feel bad about yourself, and you felt bad before you made all of these sacrifices so if you start feeling bad again what was the whole point?

> I've started describing certain types of traumatic events as 'origin stories' for heroes or villains

This reminds me of a certain segment from "This American Life".

Tragedy Minus Time Equals Happily Ever After

Ron Mallett was ten years old when his father died unexpectedly of a heart attack. A year later, after picking up a comic book based on H.G. Wells' book The Time Machine, Ron concocted perhaps the world's most complicated plan to try to see his dad again. A half-century later, Dr. Ronald Mallett wrote a book about his plan, called "Time Traveler".

From the blurb on "Time Traveler": This is the dramatic and inspirational first-person story of theoretical physicist, Dr. Ronald Mallett, who recently discovered the basic equations for a working time machine that he believes can be used as a transport vehicle to the past.

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/324/my-brilliant-plan

I read the Book “The Highly Sensitive Person”, and besides the heavy implication that Carl Jung almost had sensory processing difficulties mapped out, it delineates people who think they are introverts or extroverts into two dimensions, and asserts there was a point in your childhood where people who were flooded with sensory overload decided to use it as a superpower or withdrew. It also speculated that it likely depended on your attachment pattern with adults (ie your parents).

As to the “think they are extroverts” comment, 5is part is unfortunately a tangent but the notion is that a “true” extrovert gets recharged by people, rather than drained. If you throw parties and then have to hermit up for a week after, you’re a highly intuitive person but you’re not an actual extrovert, and you will be better able to take care of yourself if you recognize this about yourself. And if you’re an introvert because your bad interactions are evidence that you must be, it may actually be that you get flooded, and once flooded the quality of your interactions drops drastically and you come across like a child. In both cases titration helps. Quality over quantity.

My partner is an intuitive introvert who thinks they are an extrovert. Once we both figured the sensory part of the equation, I bought myself stealth ear plugs and that greatly increases how long I can let her do her thing before I have to tap out.

My love of cryptography, data science, and signal processing is a direct consequence of my privacy and trust being violated when I was younger. A consequence of seeing information is power and this belief that the power of correctly predicting future outcomes can be mathematically modelled and surprises are variables that simply weren't accounted for. As I have gotten older, I have a much more nuanced understanding about personal relationships, but a primal drive to "solve" relationships so I don't get hurt is still there.

The barrier for entry in becoming a successful doctor vs becoming a successful software engineer is very different. The amount of struggle you have to go through in order to reach society's evaluation of successful is very different. I would simply argue that traumatic events are much more motivating and this ends up being necessary to stick through the process of becoming successful in a competitive field like medicine. I think the same exists in specific focuses of software development. I imagine some of the most successful cryptography experts were at some point motivated by realizing the value of having and losing privacy.

The most successful people in medicine and software development I know are the complete opposite of sociopathic. Becoming a billionaire is not how I would measure success. Being good at management and staying a c-level execute at these large corporations is a skill in itself. Whenever I come across financial success = sociopath rhetoric, I think about how my perception has changed over time regarding Ellen Pao, the interim CEO of Reddit. "Pao Effect" is named after her.

https://www.zuckerman.com/news/insightzs/inbox-pao-effect

Disorder is a strong term that I don't believe is appropriate in this context. People have different standards for success, but by saying these people are driven by a disorder or imbalance implies that following any ambition is inherently a disorder. It's a philosophy and a way of living, but it's no more right or wrong than Buddhism's notion of eternal peace residing in nonattachment and letting go of things. Chaos exists orthogonal to ambition.

No traumas here. Just the feeling that either I'm growing or I'm dying. It's like those animations where the hero runs on a bridge which is collapsing right behind him. It comes with a lot of self inflicted guilt for doing things other than the productive kind. I am miserable on weekends. It's not very balanced and I don't like it, but on the other hand I wouldn't want to moderate it and lose the drive. Balancing all of this is always difficult; kind of finding your own Lagrange point, and likewise energy intensive to remain there.

I believe this will a key question for humanity to answer in order to better ourselves: why do seemingly similar psychological phenomena seem to cause some people to become dysfunctional while causing others to become super successful?

I think anxiety/ambition is a great example. It seems like it shows up in other places too. For example, people with bipolar disorder seem to make great artists. People with dyslexia seem to be better at certain non-reading visual tasks (such as recognize Escher-like "impossible" images) [1].

We could have the "gain" of these phenomena without the "pain," the world could be much better off. Obviously some important improvements could be made by changing how society treats/supports people we view as having disorders, but that's far from a silver bullet. More research into psychology, psychiatry, and neurology is needed.

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-advantages-of...

I always think of the example of a World War II military hiring colorblind people to analyze photos because they could see past camouflage.

Well, for every creative and productive bipolar person, there are hundreds or thousands that aren’t. We don’t hear about the non-successful ones. They are quietly hidden away and people don’t talk about them.

Yes, the question is why

> why do seemingly similar psychological phenomena seem to cause some people to become dysfunctional while causing others to become super successful?

Why do most T cells not make it out of the thymus?

Random tweaks are unlikely to be useful. Occasionally they are. Selection with random variation.

It's funny, I've always joked that I never got a PhD because I didn't have anything to prove to anyone.

Meanwhile I successfully broke a gaming addiction by realizing that if I stopped fucking around I could achieve things that people other than fellow gamers would understand.

Little did I know that aside from compensation, nobody knows what the fuck software developers are doing all day, and whether they've done something big or something trivial.

So much of computer work is neither scientific nor engineering. Perhaps they should rename the degree to Software Development, to be true to industry expectations.

And most barely even know about the compensation...

These days I talk about my hobbies. People seem to understand those, and sometimes I understand software better because of them. Which is why I routinely dive into Work Life Balance convos here with a 'get a life' speech.

> Little did I know that aside from compensation, nobody knows what the fuck software developers are doing all day, and whether they've done something big or something trivial.

You could replace software developers with a lot of other professions and this would still hold, most people don't care about others' professions.

Genuinely neither an actionable model nor evidence in some direction. Honestly, it appears this is part of that school of thought I see very commonly here in America[0] where everything needs some origin story and everyone has a disorder of some sort.

Listen, I sometimes feel quivers of anxiety when I stand in line at the deli and it is almost my turn to speak. But that's not a disorder. And the parts that feed my ambition come from a different place. I am successful by most people's standards, but it wasn't fear or paranoia that brought me here but a very happy "I can do more" feeling. And as I win, I feel even more motivated to win and become more ambitious. And this is not a me story. I think the fact that many people are able to put The Motivation Myth into action proves that it's common to a lot of us.

I run eng at a prop fund, so of course there's always the fear that we'll get beaten tomorrow in some irrecoverable way as our algos trade while we sleep. But that's a different kind of paranoia and if what the guys quoted experienced is like what I feel it's not like anxiety. It's different. I am never convinced that we are the best. We have to keep moving to stay winning and no part of our stuff is good enough ever.

That's way different from the feeling I got when I first asked out a girl, which was a much more real fear that matched the deli line anxiety in quality though not severity.

So no, I reject this model of motivation as anxiety.

0: it may be common elsewhere, but I encountered it in the US first and most commonly

The unfortunate thing about anxiety is that it’s just as possible, probably more so, to end up avoidant and underperforming rather than ambitious and overambitious.

This is just fetishization of a disorder's side effect, a sort of blindness not unlike sociopathic tendencies, known to drive people to the top. There is a price to be paid for this, and it's the inability to see the bigger picture. The inability to see the world holistically. The inability to see the forest. It creates shallow, surfacy social dynamics devoid of meaning. In our case it created one devoid of a future too. One can thrive in a sick world with sickness, but the world can't thrive without us finding a way to heal each other.

All success is socially motivated, but there is a limit to how satisfying monetary success alone can be. Our brain is a social supercomputer that will always find this arrangement lacking, particularly because it falls short of the potential of our communal, often self-sacrificial nature, which are evolutionary adaptations and the key for our collective, long-term survival. There is a reason we are drawn to participating in something bigger than our fickle, unreliable, temporary selves. Understanding our lack of potential individually as opposed to communaly is the key to the future. It's also what enlightenment is, it's nudging this inconvenient truth in our brain into our consciousness, as we are normally protected from realizing how artificial and limited our selves are.

After watching many dog interactions at the dog park, it is my slightly informed opinion that what we call 'herding instinct' is in fact Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

Especially for Corgis. Some get so visibly agitated by the chaos of a dog park that they act out and the owners stop bringing them after a couple of bad experiences.

I’ve felt that anxiety but I wouldn’t call it ambition. Ambition is me wanting to better myself, to have more opportunities, and to achieve my purpose in life. The anxiety is a white knuckle feeling that makes me keep my head down and and makes me scared to take risks. While risk avoidance can be beneficial, it hasn’t propelled me nearly as far as wanting to be or do something great. Maybe there is a kind of fear of being nothing in there somewhere, but that’s not what anxiety feels like to me either. To me, anxiety often has no identifiable cause. Sometimes it’s a vague feeling of having done something wrong or not being good enough combined with a feeling of tension or stress. I find working enjoyable because it distracts me from the feeling, but I also have many other enjoyable distractions that aren’t related to work.

I’ve seen this go both ways.

The other outcome is that people are so terrified of trying anything (maybe because of fear of failure, but not always) that they never do anything.

Something is a disorder if it is disruptive to what is widely perceived as a constructive life. Anxiety driving one to become more successful can hardly be construed as such.

Only if you take individual happiness and contentment as the ideal baseline, and deviations from it as dysfunction, would all forms of anxiety be considered disorders. But such an ideal is incongruent with reality, which is an adversarial landscape where survival and reproduction mediate existence, not individual happiness or contentment.

Basically every intelligent person I know has an anxiety disorder of some sort.

This. The more we like to think about things and be creative, the more our minds go to any number of imaginary situations, many of which can be negative. It's kinda the opposite of the age when we were all hunters and gatherers and our very source of anxiety was legit survival. So our minds were trained to NEED anxiety. But now it's so hard to turn that off..

I think you can analyze most human behavior as driven by some kind of anxiety if you want. i.e. I eat because I'm anxious about starving to death. But it's not considered a disorder unless it places you outside of fuzzy "normal" bounds and impairs your life in some way. Lots of people are ambitious, that's normal.

Anxiety is definitely different from hunger. You can get anxious about it when you’re lost in mountains and know that it’s a second week without food already and chances get pretty low. But daily hunger is nowhere near nor similar to anxiety.

I used to look at people who exude Bad Ass Mother Fucker vibes and think, "ooh, scary," then later "ooh, jealous" and now all I can think is, "who hurt you?"

Why does a grown ass man need to be the scariest person in a room? It's a lot of pageantry, and a random mix of bluff and impulse control. The scariest guy in the room is the one who's been doing martial arts for 10 years and still wears polo shirts and is quiet. Beware the person wearing roomy pants and comfortable shoes who just smiles gently when something vaguely threatening is said. Especially if they ask you please not to do what you're doing. "I don't want to put you in traction but I will in half a heartbeat if you look like you're going to hurt someone. Please don't make me."

If it was really the case then an anxious person should be able to talk themselves out of anxiety.

Aiming for a goal is great, but that's kinda not ambitious enough. Real ambition is reaching that goal with minimum effort and minimum headaches (or anxiety).

By self-inflicting headaches and anxiety on the very get go , you are also automatically waiving the best and pretty much sole optimal outcome. Not very ambitious of you, isn't it?

I don't know if this can help anybody.

I drew inspiration from Bill Gates quote : "I will always pick a lazy person to do some hard task because they'll find the least resource intensive way of doing it" something like that, the gist was anyway.

Well, isn't this comment thread the very definition of survivorship bias

It seems to be true for a decent chunk of middle managers, and other sorts of “in the middle” kind of talent. But it is definitely not true for the higher positions. The higher executives are usually the shark-like sociopaths turning middle managers into anxious messes.

A good indicator of a good middle manager is if they realize this or not. Middle managers that are always walking on eggshells are the worst, and they just pass all that anxiety downward. Good ones can take those tactics in stride and shield their employees. By extension, a good company will allow those managers to exist, but bad ones will weed out any resistance, only leaving the eggshell walkers.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. Ambition is disorder.

Fits right in.

For someone who is not aware of the inescapable links of everything in the surrounding universe , ambition can become a recipe for disaster. That’s why sometimes it is called “blind ambition”.

As a reasonably successful person I readily admit to this.

I thought anxiety was supposed to be debilitating. I always thought ambition was a product of insecurity.

Im on this picture and I dont like it

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