Why do Ivy League students self-sabotage?

A large portion of the student body at every American college is "drowning themselves in pleasure and mindlessness". The simple, naturalistic explanation is that when Harvard students abandon themselves to partying and procrastination, it is for the same reason that students at Boston University or Colorado State do it: i.e., they're young, horny, and on the loose for the first time in life, and their mental circuitry for self-regulation isn't fully wired up yet. But this account does not satisfy the Harvard man, who is at pains to distinguish his habits of procrastinton as themselves the mark of a Harvard man, a proof of belonging to an elite order.

I studied at Harvard and the answer is that they want to pretend to be so smart and talented that they don't need to work. The image is of the effete aristocrat who enjoys life without lifting a finger.

Think of George W. Bush: Got into Yale (Harvard too!) because his blue-blood line always did. Mediocre grades. Lots of alcohol and drugs. (Quit that later.) Avoided Vietnam with the cushiest fun job as a fighter pilot who never flies out of Texas skies (and mostly skipped that too). Led some companies funded by his rich family. President twice.

Who wouldn't want that?

Some are born with goals, some find their own goals, and some have goals thrust upon them.

Being a smart kid can be hard. Parents, teachers and peers see that mythical attribute "potential" and push you in directions to reach it.

Get A's in school? Gotta be a doctor or lawyer. (OK, that ages me, today they'd be pushing for programmer.)

Graduating college with a degree you never wanted must be depressing for the person who sees it as a work-prison and a life sentence. Better to fail, to drop out, to disappointed all, to get a chance to start over.

The very lucky few, and I count myself among them, have both potential and the freedom to find their own path - the thing that provides pleasure - where people pay you to do what you love. And adults around you who accept that, even if it's not a high-prestige occupation. (Programming in the 80s wasn't the career choice it is today.)

Ivy league students don't get there by themselves. A life-time of adults help you, pay for you, drive you around, push you. To those whom much is given, much is expected. And the weight of expectation can sit very heavy.

In my experience with my interns, many of whom graduated from Harvard like me, some students at all universities suffer from burnout from their strenuous childhoods. So I sympathize that some kids need to chill a little. I wouldn’t call it self sabotage, but I understand the author is just trying to understand their classmates better.

I’m not sure if a cry for help / agitating at the university will matter. I’m not sure it’s so easy to blame parents either.

Lowell, Palo Alto, Amador Valley, Mission Viejo and Lynbrook are so ridiculously stressful. And that’s just in the Bay Area in California. Some parents from here send their kids to Exeter and Andover, which also really work the kids to the bone. Is Nightengale Bamford “easy?” Dalton and Trinity? Ultimately as long as there are so few spots for so many kids with genuine cognitive gifts, parents, students and teachers will deem insane competition in high schools rational. And that will manifest in mental health issues - ranging from quirks to crises - later in life.

One reason I haven't heard yet is that the work gets harder.

Before I went to Oxford, I'd never run into anything mathy that I couldn't understand. I don't mean that I got it right the first time, though that tended to happen, but in high school I either just got it with no problem, or I understood the answer when I saw the explanation. This goes for both math/science class itself and math contests that I enjoyed doing. No real mysteries, either trivial mistakes or some angle you hadn't seen, but well within reach.

Then in uni I would run into problem sheets where I not only could not get the answer, I couldn't even find a page in the ten books that seemed relevant. Neither could my study partners. I'd show up at the tutorial and the tutor would throw up some equations that made it seem like a five minute job, when I'd sat in the library for 5 hours having discovered nothing. I'm talking something like a 10 problem sheet where between me and my buddies we managed 2 correct answers, 2 somewhat close, and 6 complete mysteries.

This can be a shock. People react in different ways, and one reaction is to not try.

In the end the thing to do is... study harder. When you understand these problems in depth you are no longer doing an equation fishing expedition, you actually understand what you are looking for.

> One of my friends would always say (after poor grades or job rejections) "I wasn't even trying." By his logic, if he didn't try, then he didn't really fail, because the true extent of his abilities remained untested. He would often play videos games rather than study, just so he could have a plausible excuse for failure. It would be an existential threat for him to do his absolute best but come up short.

I knew someone that fit this. Extremely smart and would often run circles around everyone. But when we landed a top-tier school she crumbled and used this exact excuse often - "she didn't fail because she didn't try."

Eventually she started showing mental illness in the form of delusions of grandeur and something else (not sure what). She claimed she was tested for "special" powers as a kid by the government - mind reading and ability to move objects with her mind. Eventually she came up with a story that she had cancer and needed to miss class all the time for chemo. She ended up getting expelled from the school because she refused to provide any documents from the doctors (ends up she lied and was cured "by a miracle" after she left school).

I've often wondered if her intelligence played a part in this psychotic break she demonstrated. I met a few others that were scary smart and clearly outliers at the school that showed similar behavior.

Unpopular opinion: as an overachiever doing mundane things like watching reality TV and smoking weed with friends led to more personal growth and self acceptance than any form of additional study.

just sitting with friends talking about life in a relaxed setting and practicing creating connections stress free really helped me improve my soft skills (and dumb TV shows to have stuff to discuss).

Of course the minute it's actual addition I totally see their point but drugs and partying really had a prolonged positive impact on my life.

Those experiences did convince me not to pursue a PhD on one hand but also to build 3 companies and code a lot more on the other.

Ordinary folk self sabotage as well, you don't have to be an over achieving ivy league student to be that way. No one likes failure and many people understand their societal worth is bound to their status/career and not to who they are as a person; hence the status anxiety and the (sometimes) self sabotaging behavior.

What the author describes is many people. Being at an ivy league school doesn't change that. In fact it might make it harder.

Through overcoming stuggle and strife we become stronger. Most of us are scared children walking around in adult bodies unaware how tenuous our grip on life is.

Dont worry about them. Focus on yourself. When you get kicked in the teeth do your best to get back up.

Created a new account to share openly since this so resonated with me…

I was told non stop growing up how gifted I was by my parents and teachers. When I didn’t get into my dream college it was earth shattering for someone receiving that level of praise. It was a personal failure.

I started smoking weed, but quickly progressed to other substances. One time I’d smoked DMT right before a final. I’d rack up lines of coke to study (with a little whiskey to take the edge off). I kept not fully applying myself for the exact reasons in the article.

It took almost a decade for me to understand having a growth mindset and I still honestly struggle with it. My big lesson here is to focus more on the process and less on the outcome.

High achievers are often burdened by the weight of expectations, and the pressure to live up to a certain brand name. Their goals and ambition are often not their own, but have been hijacked along the way by people around them and society in general. They don't always realise this themselves, but somewhere along the way they discover that it's easier to let go and find ways to escape the pressure.

Sometimes, the failure that results from this "self-sabotage" can be a good thing. It can lead to the shattering of assumptions [1] about how the world works, allowing people to redefine their self-worth, and letting them be more in tune with their own capabilities and goals without being encumbered by societal expectations.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shattered_assumptions_theory

> It was how they felt safe — it was how they could maintain the fragile illusion of never-ending perfection and success.

Indeed. Learning to take action in the face of uncertainty and failure is a major challenge for this personality type, though it's possible to unlearn that tendency with enough practice.

I wrote about a similar dynamic here [1] if it's interesting.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30223559

A bunch of Harvard grads I know have ridden that name for a decade. A small example, one was slacking off in a tech company, got laid off. They raised 1M to "do AI", with no technical skills at all. They hired a dev, six months later with no product raised a 5M seed round at a 25M valuation. No product released.

Avoidance is a coping strategy for perceived potential failiure. This correlates strongly with perfectionism (a misnomer as it has nothing to do with striving for the perfect, but it is the perpetual feeling that your best will not meet your minimum standards).

This is not to be conflated with a second point in the article. Once you pierce the veil on the context itself, be it academia or business or art or other things , it becomes extremely difficult for a person with moral integrity to allign themselves with the goals of that context.

Those two things exacerbate. For intance, when working towards your phd and gradually discovering that your field awards phd's for extremely sloppy and even obviously wrong work, it becomes very hard to motivate yourself to put in the very substantial required effort, especially when you perceive your own potential result as also not breaking the mold or solving the malaise.

> I noticed some of my friends spent increasing time consuming reality TV, experimenting with drugs, or partying.

Isn't that just describing college students everywhere?

It's not clear to me that Ivy Leaguers (or elites in general) do this any more or less than anyone else. I'd rather turn the question around: Why is it that some people thrive?

I feel like I've been very lucky in life. I've gotten to work on interesting and important stuff, I've enjoyed the work, and I'm genuinely looking foward to the future. But if a younger person asked me for life advice, I don't know what I would say. It's obvious that I couldn't teach anyone to do exactly what I did, and doing exactly what someone else did isn't how the world works anyway. The intersection of what you want to do and what the world needs from you can be so random.

Although not Ivy League, I also suffered from a paralyzing fear of failure for part of my college career. Somewhat paradoxically, I was able to overcome it by lowering my standards, allowing me to spend time working on assignments without stress. The completed assignments then frequently earned good or better grades than I was previously worrying about getting.

I could say a lot more about specifically how I changed my habits to enable this, but this comment will have to do for now.

Certainly your conclusions and observations are accurate for many. However you have to account for the extremely smart people (who are over represented in the Ivy League) who realize (or perceive, depending on your perspective) that "success" in life isn't measured by how much money you make, how prestigious a position you hold or how much "respected" people in society value how you choose to pass the time. I've befriended a lot of extremely smart people who got degrees from Ivy League schools, held very prestigious jobs, made a lot of money and were well-respected by the upper echelons of society. Many of them have worked from dawn until dusk since they left school, are now in their 50s, and are starting to realize that all the money in the world can't bring back the 30 years they wasted pushing the wheel. Who is to judge that living in a shack on the beach is a less fulfilling and happy existence than making $30 million dollars a year being the CEO of Raytheon and profiting off of destruction, sitting in a cubicle punching out code or working as some other functionary making a good salary?

Another common reason for self-sabotage that the article doesn’t mention is ego.

Failure sucks, especially when it’s because you just aren’t good enough. But if you self-sabotage, at least you were right. You thought you’d fail and you did fail. Ego wins!

And who knows, maybe if you actually tried, you wouldn’t have failed! You weren’t not good enough after all, you just didn’t try. You totally could’ve done it if you wanted to, you just didn’t wanna.

Ego stays nice and safe.

Another observation: While skimming over the blog post and Twitter being down(ed) and somewhat itself self-sabotaged, I also followed the mentioned links in the article.

The whole experience felt so pre-social media era. Blog posts link to other blog posts which they regards as valuable and drive a discussion without ads and distraction.

It feels very early 2000th like and I enjoyed it. I still miss technorati. :)

It seems a little weird to generalize one's friend group to a supposed problem at all Ivy League[0] schools. Although, I'm sure there are students like this at most highly-ranked universities.

A lot of the social and anti-responsibility aspects of this (like telling friends that you didn't fail because you didn't even try in the first place) sounds, for lack of a better way of putting it, very late millennial and gen-Z. I was a pretty terrible undergraduate student (though I didn't succumb to the vices OP mentions), but at least I owned up to it and did my best to salvage my education once I hit a fairly deep low and recognized that I needed to make some changes if I wanted to be successful.

[0] Is this moniker even all that relevant nowadays? I attended an Ivy 20+ years ago and even then it didn't feel like it mattered much. The US News & World Reports rankings were what people cared about, and there were plenty of non-Ivy schools at the top of that list.

In school getting help from others or spending money to solve your problems is basically illegal. This does not prepare you well for later. Some students have problems making that change especially if they didn't even know of the existence of that change or if they were heavily conditioned by their experience in their first twenty or thirty years.

> Although they talked about how badly they wanted to achieve, it seemed that their real goal was to guarantee failure.

Do they want to achieve or do they merely feel expected to?

I've had plenty of cases in my life where I did not want what someone expected/expects me to achieve, so my solution was/is to just never get around to it. It was a charade to maintain a reasonable level of social standing with the person expecting the thing without spending effort chasing something I did not value.

For example, I am very out of shape. Yes, it is not healthy, but the life I live doesn't require any physical capacity. I have other priorities. But if I say that, there are people who will be mad at me and increase their level of nagging. Better to show interest, and just let the lack of any success seem like failure.

There are plenty of cases where it is better to seem forgetful or incompetent than unambitious, even if you are.

I started doing this in fifth grade. Maybe I'm precocious.

Just maybe there are some unique flavors to this experience in elite schools but the general phenomenon is found everywhere on every college campus, and possibly anywhere there’s a clear transitionary period from a time of less responsibility into the realities imposed by growing into true adulthood.

College is the time to fail if you’re going to do it, enjoy the freedom.

The consequences of failure only grow with age.

There has been countless books discussing what causes this behaviour at length. The author is right, but runs a lot deeper than that obviously.

Michael Sandel in his recent book[^1] called "The Tyranny of Merit" analyses the problem at length. It's a worthy read on a variety of topics around "merit" in our society, etc. Michael Sandel is a teacher of political philosophy at Harvard and one of the most well known philosophers of our time.

Another book called "The Danish Way of Parenting"[^2] explains how to raise kids that are: (a) self-starters in the sense that they don't rely on others for goal-setting and (b) coping in a healthy and constructive way with failure.

How can someone raise a child that will have to compete against the global young intellectual elite? Private tutors are common in London, amongst those who can afford them. They fly tutors for 160 BGP/hour alongside the family to Santorini for a week or two[^3]. Imagine having to compete with these ppl for a spot to an Ivy League college. Quoting from the respective Economist[^3] article:

> Tutoring has risen in line with a cultural shift: university education is now the norm for a larger share of school-leavers than ever before. Close to half of all 25- to 34-year-olds in the 37 wealthy countries that make up the OECD now have a degree. Other countries are fast catching up: by 2030 China and India will account for half of the 300m graduates in this age group worldwide.

> Widening access has changed the nature of the competition. Despite the large rise in the number of universities, the same institutions tend to fill the top places in the international rankings. This means that education is now a global battle: far more people in a wider range of countries are competing for slots in the same few, elite institutions. Twenty years ago, America’s Ivy League universities would admit a quarter or more of all applicants. In 2020 Harvard’s acceptance rate hit a new low of 5%.

[^1]: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374289980/thetyrannyofmer...

[^2]: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Danish-Way-Parenting-Happiest-Confi...

[^3]: https://www.economist.com/1843/2020/10/09/first-class-flight...

One issue that I didn't see mentioned in the article or any of the comments so far, is that all these kids who got into Ivy league schools saw themselves as overachievers / received lots of praise relative to their peers while in high school. But once you get into a top school, everyone there is like that and you are no longer special, you are just average compared to your peers.

You might have been then top student in your city/state, but when you are suddenly surrounded by top students from your _entire country_ it is statistically unlikely that you would be the best. That ought to be demoralizing to a lot of young adults whose entire sense of self-worth has been riding on being the best at academia/sports/whatever.

If you actually manage to get accepted to some Ivy, chances are you were at the very top of you class in HS. Excellent grades, excellent test, lots of extracurriculars, and all that.

The majority can't accomplish those things by just coasting through HS, and living a "normal" teenage life. Rather, it means dedicating lots and lots of your time to studying, extracurriculars, etc.

And it doesn't stop when you get accepted. So to me, it makes complete sense that some students get disillusioned - and start exploring other areas in life. It's not like the grind is going to stop when you start working - many of these ivy league grads go directly to the banking/consulting/law grinder that demands 60-100 hour work weeks.

As a fan if Fantasy, this article reminds me of Lev Grossman's The Magicians. It comes from very similar experiences the author had going to an Ivy League school. It is probably the best deconstruction of the magical school (think Harry Potter) subgenre because it touches on such real human experiences.

Most of the cast are people who did well in high school and were suddenly transported into an environment where they weren't special. It turns out being transported into a magical world doesn't make your problems go away.

Good read. The problem is even worse with legacy Ivy league students.

The article was extremely on point. We didn't dare to try. Life is much too complicated, and many retreat to the safety of the familiar. I agree with others this problem is not at all unique to Ivy League. Instead, it is rather the futility of trying, the absence of a visible goal, and the lack of direction in life that, perhaps, made an Ivy League student feel for the first time in his life that maybe there is some meaning in the non-pursuit of happiness after all.

Yale has a 97% graduation rate. This can't be a big phenomenon there. Although many take more than four years.

Now, there are good schools where a sizable fraction don't make it. UC Santa Barbara, California's finest party school, has about an 88% graduation rate, and only 72% finish in four years. Further down the food chain, there are the schools which admit almost everybody but flunk out half the freshman class.

Or maybe they realize that once there is "Ivy League" on your resume, you pretty much cannot fail at life and will always find a good job no matter what, so might as well have a good time, instead of spending all your free time studying in pursuit of prestige.

I’m a Canadian immigrant. I didn’t have recognizable highschool credentials. So had to go through a local college 1st year program. I had a 4.0 GPA when I applied to a Canadian university for second-year transfer program. I applied to only one school, and one program with no backups. Got in and graduated with a 4.0.

During my internships at Microsoft, I met a ton of Ivy kids. I was very intimidated and clearly went through imposter syndrome.

There was a touch of elitism which I think was their downfall. Every kid from my university got a return offer. But there were so many Ivy kids who didn’t. And it seemed like they didn’t even care, but only after they’d already knew they were not coming back. Most of those kids didn’t really make it big in my opinion, now 12 years later.

Clearly, humility isn’t a skill they teach in schools. And in many cases, especially when you’re a noob in the industry, lack of it reveals an inner Dunning-Kruger that make one unattractive.

I’ve recruited many Ivy kids over the years. There is a bimodal distribution. There are ones that are truly very smart - these tend to be humble too. Then there are those who flaunt - almost always there is no substance with these kids.

Once you’re in the industry, nobody gives a shit which university you went to or what your grades were.

>One of my friends asked an acquaintance for a referral, but was ghosted. She deleted the conversation and tried to pretend that the exchange never happened.

What did he expect her to do? Cry about it?

There's a massive disconnect between what students do at universities and actual effective learning. Universities are not sources of knowledge, they're more like knowledge middlemen that sell branded knowledge for more than what it's worth at face value. It's no wonder that students stop caring once they realize this. That's really what explains the attitudes in this article. It's not lack of discipline, it's justified disillusionment.

I think what’s described in this post is the issue for some high-achieving students (Ivy or not) when it comes to self-sabotage but there’s a few others:

My personal story involved two years of self-sabotage. However it wasn’t intentional, nor was I hiding from failure, I just didn’t know how to go about achieving my potential. School was trivial for me before college minus my freshman year of high school, in which my grades were still good, I just got assigned an inordinate amount of homework every night and was programmed to do all the assigned readings etc. By the end of high school, I figured out how to do the bare minimum necessary to succeed and get As. College…doesn’t really work that way. I worked the same way I did in high school and got anything from As to Cs based on my natural aptitude for the subject. When I did study for exams I wasn’t studying effectively. If I didn’t know how to solve a homework problem, I just skipped it and figured it didn’t matter in the wash.

That continued for me until I did work in a lab as a junior, met PhD students and postdocs, and realized I wanted to get a PhD myself because I found what they did fascinating. The last two years were very stressful for me since I had to improve my B+ GPA so I could get into a good program, but my PhD student friends showed how I should be approaching college and I managed to fix a lot of my bad habits. I remember early on expressing my doubts I’d be able to pull it off to one of the postdocs early and he said “I don’t get it, you’re a smart guy, why is your transcript fully of Bs and Cs?” The answer really was that I just didn’t know how poorly I was applying myself.

The other issue that afflicted me to a degree in my early years but afflicted many people I knew more significantly during my time as an undergrad at an Ivy was that they didn’t know what they wanted to do after. These people often had better grades than me and were studying something that they enjoyed but they weren’t thinking about their career after school. They didn’t do internships or extracurriculars that might help them figure out their interests. They spent their summers studying abroad, relaxing at home, etc. While there’s nothing wrong with those things in a vacuum, it meant that they left school with a good GPA (or not because they didn’t have a goal and thus didn’t see a need to apply themselves), a fairly empty resume, and no clue what they wanted to do with their lives. Up until this point was the tacit assumption that they were smart and went to a good school and they’d find a good job they liked at the end of the road. However, due to how they spent their college years, they had to spend a good chunk of their 20s figuring out what they wanted from their lives. During that period they worked uninspiring jobs they certainly didn’t need an Ivy League education to get and sometimes required going back for a masters to retool themselves once they found a passion.

These issues seemed quite universal. It didn’t matter what your legacy status or family background was, it was just not obvious how to make the most out of college until it was too late for many of us. This is probably equally a problem at less highly ranked schools, but given that Ivies tend to collect motivated people, our struggle to succeed is under more of a microscope.

every time I find an article on hackernews analysizing or attempting to explain human behavior, I get nauseous. stick to technology. my goodness.