Success is about more than a good uni degree
My high school used to run these big, glossy billboards at the mall, advertising for students. Think lots of earnest blonde girls with impossible sleek ponytails standing next to wholesomelooking young men gripping hockey sticks. ‘‘Great Expectations’’ boomed the billboards, staring majestically down at the throngs of harried shoppers with arms of toilet paper and fish fingers.
It certainly did have great expectations for us as students. These felt even more dramatic to me as I’d moved mid-high school from England, jumping from a Grange Hill-esque state school where people coma-ed out in the toilets into the high-achieving, high-flying hothouses of Auckland private schools.
Suddenly there were ski camps, fashion shows, and tiny pristine sandwiches in even tinier pristine lunch boxes. And of course the overwhelming, omnipresent expectation that you were going to be A. High. Achiever. In. Life.
I’ve tried to largely forget about high school, but I ran smack bang into the memories this week when the US college admission bribery scandal broke. It wasn’t really that surprising, was it, the idea that celebrities would pay the big bucks to get their precious bunnies into prestigious colleges. There’s a well-established history of new libraries and swimming pools coincidentally appearing on campuses at the same time as the children of wealthy alumni. This was just a little more illegal.
But it’s also unsurprising territory to us because we have much of the same culture in New Zealand. Obviously we don’t have Ivy League schools, and it’s hard to imagine parents resorting to bribery to get their kids in to Auckland Uni or Vic, but we absolutely have the same rigid idea of a ‘‘pathway to future success’’ for our kids.
Our middle-class aspirational parental groups also believe in high-intensity childhoods, assessed by how many As we get, how many extracurriculars we do, and how many hours we spend doing extra study. They send their kids to schools like mine, and grade our success as children at 18 by whether we make the final cut into Auckland or Victoria to do either law or med. That law degree is our Ivy League; our golden bullet for future success.
The most glaring problem with the overachiever mentality is that there really is no generic formula for ‘‘success’’.
Sure, there are always going to be those people who have conventional, neatly defined roads to personal success. Normally involving a safe career in a white-collar company, a healthy pay cheque and a ute the size of a school.
But there are also many kids out there who’ve got very different ideas of success. The first time I ever really felt successful was when I made a room of 100 people laugh at a joke about Prince William’s butt. It was the first time I’d ever really tried comedy, and was performing a poetic rap battle between Kim K and Kate Middleton. That electrifying ripple of laughter across a room full of strangers was way more powerful than any uni paper.
It’s a cliche, but you can’t deny the fact that success means something different to everyone. And our current one-dimensional definition means we’re good at creating lawyers, and we always will be. But it risks losing talented creative people who can’t shake off the great expectation they should be doing something ‘‘sensible’’. If you want to have a meaningful life you need to be free to pursue that – not get locked into a future that’s exhausting and unrewarding.
The first time I ever really felt successful was when I made a room of 100 people laugh at a joke about Prince William’s butt.
Because this obsession with pressure cooker over-achieving childhoods is exhausting. It feeds directly into millennial burnout culture, where young people feel perpetually strung out because they’ve been optimised for achievement and are utterly miserable about it.
In 2017, studies found that the predominant emotions among New Zealand girls aged 18 to 24 were anxiety and stress, largely due to their uncertainty about the future, coupled with the need to be seen to be succeeding.
The irony is that, even when you are succeeding, you don’t feel like you are succeeding. How can you? Perfect is impossible, but in this world if you’re not perfect then you’re failing. It’s a grim world.
I know everyone obviously wants the best for their kids. But instead of sitting back and booming about our great-and-highly-conventional expectations for kids these days, we need to admit that nobody actually knows what success looks like – it’s up to individuals to find out for themselves.