The Rise of Post-Competitive Grievance Disorders

Every aspect of life, it seems, has become a competitive struggle.

For young people, the school years are characterized by a continuous process of assessments, tests, and evaluations to determine their relative standing and promise. They are constantly told to distinguish themselves, pursue enrichment opportunities, and focus their energies on getting accepted at the best college. Even in extra-curricular activities like sports, theater, clubs, or debate, all of which have taken on new instrumental value as resume-builders for college admission, they are pressured to out-compete others for the coveted spots. And on social media, status is an unforgiving function of their market share.

It’s not much different for their parents. At work, they face the same logic of meritocratic competition and individual achievement. At home, “the pressure to make the most of our kids,” observes the parenting advice author Carl Honoré, “feels all-consuming. We want them to have the best of everything and to be the best at everything.” ¹ As we found in our 2019 national survey, parents overwhelmingly agree that they “invest much effort in providing opportunities that will give [their kids] a competitive advantage down the road.” ² As one mother, speaking of her children, put it in an interview, “To get the most out of life, you need to be competitive.”

With so many areas of life turned into competition, there is both a continuous emphasis on winning and losing and a corresponding need to explain the outcomes.

Perhaps if the competition was limited to the few positions at the top, or if there was some objective, agreed-upon way to measure merit, or if the competition had no implications for one’s sense of self-worth, the situation would be different. Except in rarified circles, our minds would be at ease. But that is not at all the case.

The competition is taking a heavy toll on everyone.

Those in the winner’s circle are often not at all what they seem. Kids who attend elite high schools, for example, are now considered an “at-risk” group with high rates of anxiety, depression, and substance abuse. Studies of college students find a strong correlation between those who take on perfectionist standards, on the one hand, and depression, eating disorders, and an inability to derive a lasting sense of satisfaction from their accomplishments, on the other. In my interviews, high-performing college students often speak of the constant struggle to meet expectations, the threat of being exposed as a fraud—“imposter syndrome”—and the tenuousness of their successes. They must continuously earn their status with ever-greater achievements and frequently feel more trapped or fearful than self-confident.

They often feel aggrieved. And they’re the apparent “winners.”

As the high numbers of kids reporting depressive episodes, thoughts of suicide, and other problems attest, the constant striving causes many to grow weary and despondent. They absorb the blows to self-worth and seek to escape further damage by withdrawing, at least temporarily, from the competition. Some feel defeated or powerless and blame themselves for lacking what others apparently have. Some are caught in the quicksand between wanting to reject the criteria by which they are found wanting yet still measuring up to them.

Still others feel disenchanted with the whole game, especially the judgments at school. “What’s the point?” they ask and assure themselves that “none of this means anything to me.”

Feeling inadequate can also breed other post-competitive grievance disorders. While peer comparison might be a source of inspiration or motivation, it can turn poisonous and divisive. Young people often report feelings of envy, anger, and resentment, feelings that can undermine their own sense of self and their relations with others.

A peer’s success can cast a shadow over us for not doing as well. When asked what it means to be successful, one college student responded with detailed benchmarks. Among other things, she listed excelling in the classroom and out, pushing yourself “to the maximum” while being outgoing, carefree, and self-confident, and having that striking “something” that will “set you apart from everyone else.” Decrying the heavy load, she then added: “The worst part is, some people magically are everything described above, making everyone else feel bad about themselves.”

How are others doing what we can’t?

Unequal success, in cases where education, background, and other characteristics seem equivalent, is especially hard to bear. To explain differences, kids frequently conclude that they are disadvantaged in some way relative to peers or siblings or to the “rest of the student body,” as one young man put it.

That young man, a college student, began taking the stimulant drug Adderall, supplied by his friends when he found himself struggling and couldn’t seem to “get a full effort in [his] academics.” Although noting that his high school, where he had stood out, was “much less competitive” than his university, he regarded his underperformance as a sign that the “playing field” that all the other students were on was somehow tilted against him. He thought the use of the drug might help to overcome his disadvantage and “level the field.”

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The level playing field idea, in various forms, is everywhere. One of the primary reasons for the now widespread practice of seeking out a psychiatric diagnosis is to put a name on the disadvantage that young people believe is keeping them from achieving their true status. The growing references to being “neurodivergent” often serve the same explanatory purpose and effort to preserve self-esteem. Their non-typical brain creates a barrier to their success.

The grievance “disorders” to which young people, indeed all of us, are prone are not simply or primarily individual pathologies or the result of a false conception of what success means in our society. The psychic toll is paid by persons, to be sure. But the pathology is in the acid bath of our competitive social order, which offers neither rest nor resolution.