In college, as the years passed and the stakes rose higher (from intro classes to job hunting) I noticed some of my friends spent increasing time consuming reality TV, experimenting with drugs, or partying. They drowned themselves in pleasure and mindlessness rather than send an application or crack open a textbook. Although they talked about how badly they wanted to achieve, it seemed that their real goal was to guarantee failure.

"Maybe they got sloppy, maybe they lacked drive, or maybe they couldn't discipline themselves." Maybe. But in my late-night talks with them, I found that it ran deeper than apathy, laziness, or an inability to self-manage. After a lifetime of habitual success, my friends weren't suddenly struggling with the familiar road to achievement; instead, they were actively sprinting in the opposite direction.

Why? Why were these overachievers suddenly sabotaging their own goals?

I think the problem was a mix of identity and self-worth mechanisms.

The Solitude and Leadership speech describes many Ivy League students: we're sheep, selected for our ability to jump through contrived academic hoops. My self-sabotaging friends fit neatly into this category. They'd all experienced a lifetime of never-ending institutional approval, gold stars, and top-of-class performance.

What resulted was a brittle existence: failure of any magnitude feels like an existential threat to people whose identity and sense of worth are based on being outstanding.

My friends were told about their immense potential throughout their entire lives. Dump trucks of praise were showered onto them. But at an Ivy League, and in the face of tackling real-world problems rather than contrived academic examples, they were smart enough to realize the impossibility of flawlessly living up to their own hype. Unfortunately, that hype was all they had, was all they'd been chasing for two decades, was the bedrock of their self-worth and identity. To protect it, they went nonsensical lengths:

• 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.

• One of my friends had their eyes on a dream job. But they never applied, and thus (in their argument to me) didn't fail because they never really got rejected.

• 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.

My friends clung, with bloody fingernails, to their bubbles of potential and hype. They were terrified of anything less than immediate, outstanding success. But doing so ironically guaranteed eventual failure, because they couldn't risk putting forth genuine effort. Even dipping a toe into the valley of disappointment would morally crush them, and they knew it.

But areas like drugs, partying, or binging TV were different. Similar to a dot-com bubble startup which only celebrates and never builds a real product, there's nothing tangible to be disappointed by. There's only hype, only potential, only promises of castles in the sky. Thus, eventually, some of my friends only ever did unproductive things. It was how they felt safe — it was how they could maintain the fragile illusion of never-ending perfection and success.

I didn't write this to belittle my friends. They just happen to be extreme examples which illustrate something I struggle with as well.

For those who might also be wrestling with something like this, I've found that Richard_Ngo's replacing fear sequence and Nate Soares' replacing guilt series have been, even within a few days of reading, tremendously valuable for me.

When I notice myself drifting, I anxiously obsess about it.

• I spend several hours writing a new life plan while consuming inspirational hustle-culture material. I analyze until I emotionally feel like the plan is going to fulfill me. This calms me down and makes me feel empowered until the next time I feel directionless or discouraged (in about six months to a year).

  • I've run this circular track of goal-setting over and over, always expecting to find lasting fulfillment or calm at the finish line. I tell myself: after this next achievement, I'll never have to work or be stressed again!

    • Every loop, I'm like a junkie who needs stronger and stronger hits of self-help material to calm his anxiety, and to give him hope that achieving this goal will be the one which gives lasting contentment (regret minimization, thinking in systems rather than goals, building and breaking habits, spiritual practices, etc).

    • I'm just like the cargo cults described by Richard Feyman: my approach clearly isn't working, but my only solution is to do more of my non-working approach — with some tweaks or with an increase in intensity.

  • My goal-setting behavior, and my anxiety about having a lack of life direction, might be due to the interplay between my personality and my society.

    • I alternate between feeling incredibly anxious and feeling like a master of the universe. This is probably because I've externalized my barometer of self-worth, and my self-esteem is based on how other people feel about me.

    • I value myself based on social approval, and thus pay most attention to what my larger society (the largest group of people in my life) tells me is "good."

    • Therefore, I've deeply and unconsciously bought into the capitalistic treadmill of American society. I solely measure my worth by prestige, productivity, and economic value, all of which are inherently brittle and have ever-rising standards.

I seem to be experiencing personal bitterness, or perhaps self-hatred.

• I'm at the point where I don't do anything for its own sake — and thus experience little joy. All work, no play. I also don't allow myself to have any "useless" hobbies. I've aimed to fully productize myself, optimize every moment, to effectively become an uninspired machine.

• I tell myself that I don't deserve to have friends or to do fun things. Those can come later — but only once I've made it. I only relax or unwind when it feels like my body and mind are rebelling or breaking down, when I have no other choice.

• There's a lot of bitterness towards myself for how hard I've driven myself, and how much I demand of myself. Part of me might secretly want me to fail. Part of me knows that my current attitude and approach are not the path to my happiness or fulfillment; rather, it's an elaborate self-punishment mechanism:

  • driving myself super hard to achieve a goal with impossible standards

  • self-sabotaging along the way

  • failing

  • punishing myself

So then I wonder: how do I break out of this pattern, and what do I actually want out of life?

• I've asked myself this question several times over the years. And my knee-jerk reaction always seems to be: "get rich" or "be powerful" or "have a big positive impact on the world."

• I think there's a problem with the way the question is worded. It implies getting something out of life, which further implies having to work towards a future payoff. It also focuses on wanting things, which naturally makes me think mimetically and gravitates towards the things which other people want.

• A better question is: how do I want to live life? It's necessarily tailored to me, it's focused on my direct controllable behavior, and it gives a steady drip of immediate payoffs. At every moment of living, I'm succeeding. I'm living in a state of success.

  • I suppose this is walking the path of virtue and the stoics. For me, the definition of virtue is to realize that the only thing within my control is my attitude.

  • But I balk at this idea because I think it might lead to downward spirals, where I feel like my attitude is bad, and thus feel bad, which makes my attitude worse.

  • Ah, but I'm not being precise with my definition of attitude here. Attitude is a separate entity from my emotions or feelings. I could be horrendously depressed with a great attitude.

  • Attitude is the bearing, the approach, the posture I have towards life. I could be tremendously emotionally volatile, but if my attitude is relentless, unstoppable, and resourceful, I can figure out how to make the most of the moment (taking into consideration all conditions such as my current emotional state).

• What about the other questions? Out of "who", "where", "what", "when", "why", and "how", we've covered "what" and "how".

  • "Who do I want to be in life" seems to have an uncomfortable bent towards mimesis.

  • "Where do I want to be in life" seems to focus on external payoffs.

  • "By when do I want my life to look like X" is the same as above.

  • "Why do I want that out of life" is kind of the exercise I'm currently doing.

So now I've settled on "how do I want to live my life?" And the answer is "with virtue, where virtue means embodying the fact that my attitude is the only thing controllable, and worth controlling."

• It's okay to feel horrible, bitter, or self-destructive. Let's just approach the situation with a great attitude, one even greater than what you believe you can currently muster.

• A great attitude is ungraspable. Its manifestation is wildly different in every situation.

Let's backtrack and look at whether this seems like it'll reasonably address everything I described above (keeping in mind that sometimes the greatest discoveries or innovations happened by accident, or seemed to be unreasonable at the time):

• It moves my valuation mechanism to be entirely internal: what's my attitude? How can I make my attitude better?

• It gets rid of goal-setting, and replaces it with: as long as I'm heading in the right direction, I'm succeeding

• It breaks me out of the cycle of living in constant failure, and rather rewards me in the current moment, which I hope will give me a better relationship with myself

In terms of habitual implementation, it becomes constantly checking in with myself: "what's my attitude?"