Underachieving to Pay Back!
Is a part of you doing this?
This is something not many people know about, even other therapists and psychologists.
But, you see, I lived 17 years in a spiritual community and worked a lot with hippies! It wasn't all hippies but there certainly were more than average, out in the world. And that caused this bizarre issue to become highlighted in my mind.
And the thing is… it's not just hippies. Actually, large numbers of perfectly competent, intelligent people do this. Perhaps not to the degree that some hippies do. But nevertheless enough to severely diminish their quality of life.
And, from a logical perspective, this behaviour makes no sense. But that doesn't stop it from happening.
It is very common for kids to not experience the love from their parents that they are biologically preconditioned to expect. Often the parents want them to succeed in life. It's natural. And, to their generation, success meant a good job and a good marriage. So they push their kids towards these goals, sometimes very strongly. Often, though not always, it's the Dad.
But when we don't also experience love from our parents, as well as the pushing, we can naturally develop quite an attitude. We want to protest. We want the parents to know that we're not happy about all this pushing without love.
How to achieve this end? How to pay the parents back for all that pressure? That's easy.
Just underachieve!
If we create an excellent work life, and a great relationship, our parents might believe that all that pushing worked. But we don’t want them to believe that.
We want them to be miserable and to sit together agonising about “Where did we go wrong?” We want them to suffer like we suffered. So we just don't deliver. We find suboptimal partners and second-rate jobs. “This is all your fault, Dad,” is what we want to say.
With hippies, this is often visible and frequently quite extreme. They very evidently can't get the material side of their life at all together.
But, even in otherwise relatively successful people, this dynamic with the parents can still be there, working to some degree beneath the surface. Even when the parents are no longer around, still the program runs!
And it's a great shame because those guys, whilst doing okay, could be doing awesome.
In my own life, I have found it useful to introspect on this dynamic. Is there a part of me underachieving to pay back?
It’s a really good investment of our time to ask ourselves this question - Am I still protesting about my childhood?
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You are scratching the surface of a very big topic that no one really wants to discuss. There is a complex relationship here between money, consumerism, personal worth or identity, sensitivity to the needs of people, generational differences, and the purpose and value of work or employment. I grew up in the sixties, went to college during the seventies, was also in a spiritual community, but without any true hippies. More conservative and traditional in practice. It was also a time of high inflation where credentialed professional employment was not easy to obtain. I worked in a youth ministry after college where I had to raise my support. I never raised what I was required. My mindset was that I could live with less. It was my first encounter with the need to develop an expansive network of relationships. As I analyzed my mindset then I realized a couple of things. First, my parents never talked about money. So, I had no familial (institutional) memory about its importance or management. Second, those who didn’t chose a corporate career, but a human services one, never had financial security. After about ten years of operating my consulting practice, a friend who had advanced to a significant job in a large corporation and I had a conversation about our different career trajectories. He longed for the freedom that I had. I responded. It would be nice to have the financial security that you have. The underachievers you describe had a perception about life that did not fit well in a modern consumer society. They saw value differently. And society at large, would see them differently too, because their orientation is not about money. So much more to say. Great topic. Thanks.
Very insightful. One question, is this a very Anglo cultural thing? Other cultures (Indian and Chinese) are extremely pressurizing of their kids to achieve, but there are not equivalent drop out sub-cultures? Is this because of a cultural deference to respecting elders/parents. The Philllipines may be another case study, where again deference to parents is part of the culture?