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.
Maybe that's what's at the root of it, but it's rarely what these kids tell themselves, I don't think. Much more of a discovery about how delayed consequences are when you just ignore them, and how good it feels to focus on the random highs you can get over the satisfaction of a job well done that doesn't pay off for a long time.
Before you've ever skipped class, the presumption is the world ends were that to happen. Then you get so drunk you sleep through the alarm and... wait, nothing? Nobody cared?! You can just go get drunk, miss class, and your parents don't come out of the walls to beat you???
There are a lot of kids, I think, who've been driven through their academic lives via purely "stick" incentives. When they find out there isn't a stick looming over their head immediately, and there are a lot of distracting "carrots" within short reach, it's hard to come back from.
Why shouldn’t they want to have opinions and goals and have needs that aren’t compatible with what they do for a living just like everyone else?
The article is about people who say they want these things, but act in a way that ensures they won’t get what they claim to want.
If they’re lying and don’t actually want the achievements they claim to want, that’s hard to tell from outside. Best we can do is take their word. But you are right that revealed preferences win in the end. You are what you do.