The obsession with achievement and development.

The obsession with achievement and development.
Posted on 19-03-2022

It is not strange in today's society, of consumption and globalization, that we observe in many people the tendency to become obsessed with academic, personal, and work achievements.

The system tells us that what is expected is to always be motivated, wanting, desiring, and achieving more. After one step there is another and within that circuit, the race can easily become dizzying and endless.

Many cases of anxiety and stress are associated with these rhythms, which are perceived as the only possible ones to belong to. Being an "overachiever", an Anglo-Saxon term to refer to this excess of ambition is well seen in today's society. It is even, in most cases, celebrated.

Society, on the contrary, rejects depression, lack of energy, sadness, laziness. It rejects it because it is not functional because it leaves us out of the race against time in which we are involuntarily immersed.

The desire is related to looking for something else, with the impulse to grow or develop, it is the excess in dissatisfaction that can mean a problem. Being within that rhythm can generate an obsession with achievement and development. This is observed in people who are constantly on the move, constantly looking for new goals and projects, and for them reaching a state implies having to achieve something else and so on.

In this context, no state is perceived as good enough, there is always something more to conquer. The desire to develop, train, and move up is so strong that they prevent the assessment of the processes and the current state. The focus is always located in the future and on what is missing.

This is so sometimes from the economic point of view and sometimes in relation to the individual's academic, work, or personal life. The way of reading reality is in relation to what has not yet been reached, always searching, without rest, as if climbing a hill without finding the top.

Being on this path implies great self-demand and pressure and a feeling of never finishing achieving the objective, while trying to be outstanding in everything that is carried out, generating great frustration when something does not go as planned. This sustained stress over time can also generate health consequences. The non-rest has repercussions, these people do not allow themselves deep relaxation practically at any time.

In the background of this race in search of achievements and constant development, we can find a need, perhaps, to sustain an image, or we could ask ourselves to whom all this effort is directed, with whom or whom it wants to meet. This issue of the sustained effort to be "better" or good enough in the eyes of others, generally has a root in the first bonds of love, where sometimes the criticism or demand of parental figures leads to enhancing this need. of compliance.

The achievements, from this reflection, can be seen as gifts to these figures, a demonstration of their own abilities that seek recognition. Working on these underlying issues allows us to distinguish those objectives that are our own, from those that are there for others. When there is an excess of energy in relation to ambition and achievements, we can intuit that there is something unconscious that directs them and that the choice is not as voluntary as is sometimes thought.

 

Thank You