I did comment before on how I find many, if not most, parents determined to grow their kids like horses on a stud farm for the purposes of display in a zoo. Yes, and I mean this quite close to literally in some cases. I can’t come up with a fancy or catchy name for this behaviour pattern yet, but I’m open to suggestions.
This is just a commentary and I make no point here, and I’m certainly not saying what’s right and what’s wrong. It’s just an observation I made and wanted to verbalise it and get your thoughts on it.
Parents’ defensive maneuver
I’ve covered the basics before – parents choose to shower their kids with everything they could possibly do – waiting in long lines for weeks to get admissions in the best kindergarten schools, sending kids off to extra coaching, and super-extra coaching to make sure they top their kindergarten, and if time permits send the kids off to extracurricular activities which are precisely timed and measured. Some learn music, some learn sports, but all in a measurable and quantifiable format. Why you ask? So that when the kid “fails in life” (failure again defined by said parents), the parents can claim they did everything they could possibly do. What more could they have done? Now this would be perfectly fine if it worked, but I’m now convinced beyond any doubt that it doesn’t. (For those not familiar with scientific terminology – all this means is that it has no effect on the outcome whatsoever, so don’t cite examples of where it worked and tell me it doesn’t ‘necessarily fail’ – if it doesn’t consistently succeed – or even succeed with any statistical significance, it’s called a failure. You might as well be throwing dice as your predictor for success.)
Two years after I pass out of college I can confidentaly say that some of my supposedly stupid friends from back in school and college turned out to be greater successes than most contemporaries from prestigious technical institutes who used to look down on us. I can now boast of ex-classmates who are reputed professional singers, an actress, a guy who runs an advertising company, a guy who failed his 12th exam (a BIG deal in Middle Class India) now lives on the sea-shore of Wales discovering oil, and countless others who became successes in things that I’d have hardly imagined were accessible to commoners. These are kids whom I’ve known to have never attended a single class, spent their time in coffee shops all day and spent time doing what they loved to do (which isn’t saying a lot). These were people who did everything wrong with their lives, by social norm. And yet, every time I talk to them when I visit Pune, I experience an intellectual high I no longer find in my own field. These people can talk about everything from literature (and I mean real literature – not Harry Potter books), wines, complex cheeses, intricacies of musical styles from different continents, history, philosophy, movie production, social dynamics, discrete mathematics, quantum physics, nanotechnology, and whatever else you can think of (had to cut down the list up there). These people are truly happy, and fun to be with.
If I contrast them with the people who did everything right with their lives, those were labelled by society as some of the best technical minds from the country, university toppers, 4.0ers, etc., I feel a great sense of frustration. The very people who went to a million coaching classes, did extra school work, would feel guilty for having missed out on the first five minutes of a class they were accidentally late to, are now the ones who spend their lives squabbling over marginal pay raises, fighting for promotions, cribbing about work-life balances, and bitching every evening about managers, co-workers and their companies. You’d have imagined these people spending spending their time discussing advanced algorithms, new breakthroughs, or products that change the world, and you’d be wrong. Then again we know what the smart MBAs from the best business schools, who were funded from taxpayers money and glorified in the press, have done to our economy – we’re all feeling the effects of that. It’s a gloomy and depressing scene in the technology and financial world today – where supposedly the smartest people exist.
Looking back on my life, I feel these people are the real failures in life. The reason we don’t hear about it as “failure” in common society is simply because all possibility of blame has been removed. Parents did all they could – they gave these guys the best tuitions, the best schools, the best of everything. They did everything Middle Class Morality expected of them. It was so much easier to push all responsibility on society rather than show a little backbone and take the risk of being right. You just send the kid to whatever the majority calls the “best thing to do” and you’re now no longer responsible for the kid’s failure – the majority will never admit they made a mistake – and the world moves on.
The Addiction to Failure
You heard that right. It is my observation that such parental behaviour encourages an addiction to failure in kids who are brought up this way. The I-did-all-I-could-do attitude comes from an inherent addiction to failure. During my last trip to Pune – which was my first trip in the middle of the recession, I realised something. My “loser” friends have fun and happy lives because they are really afraid to fail. They don’t know when they might fail, and they’ve experienced some really bad failures in their lives. They know the difference between hitting rock bottom when nobody cares for you, and the mushy-mushy failure when you have sympathisers. This means that they know what real failure tastes like (all you Indian readers can imagine what failing 12th standard feels like) and will do everything they can to avoid it. It also means that whatever fear they had of hitting rock-bottom has been faced and nothing frightens them easily. Someone who scores horribly in exams and goes to bad colleges will know that there is no pity to be expected in real failure – there’s only condescension, insult, and humiliation. You learn to live with the fact that you have nobody on your side. You are relegated to reading in newspapers about various opportunities, initiatives and whatever being offered exclusively to students on fancy colleges or those meeting certain criteria knowing that you have no chance in hell of ever being noticed.
The winners however, are addicted to failure because it gets them pity – an addiction worse than drugs, mainly because it cannot be easily identified. If you do everything right, and yet fail or are miserable, you have a bunch of people to pet you and pamper you. Over time, you start looking for trouble because it’s the lab-rat or dog-training reinforcement behaviour. You do something – you get sympathy – you do it again. When you’re a socially-defined winner, the majority won’t ever admit they were wrong, and instead enable you to feel sorry for yourself in order to justify themselves.
I know this seems a bit counter-intuitive and crazy, but look around you, the evidence is there. If I weren’t in Microsoft, or hadn’t gotten far in Code4Bill three years ago, how many sympathisers would have I had? Would you have said Microsoft doesn’t know how to hire good people? Now put me in the best college in India, and rethink the last two sentences. Would you have told me that I’m simply that bad which is why I failed? That’s real fear of failure – when you know that if you fail, you’ve got nobody to symapthise with you, and instead the entire world is waiting to tell you how much you truly suck. Now when I look back seven years ago at those aspiring singers, actors, writers, musicians, etc. I realise that the reason they learnt to be happy and fun is because they got to experience first-hand what it means to be ignored, rejected and not cared for, and I can safely say that boy are those people afraid to go back there again! The winners though, experienced early on that so long as they do what society asks them, and keep whining about how their life sucks, they get that many more admirers and sympathisers, and I can imagine why they’d want to go back there over and over and over again.
Fear of Failure provides objectivity
Another counter-intuitive statement and yet one that will make sense by the time I’m done arguing it.
People who’re afraid of real failure, know what it takes to win. They do whatever is in their power to win. What they don’t do is irrelevant stuff in a defensive maneuver. People were always surprised to find me and my friends watching movies during exams, and we’d open books at the maximum one hour before an exam. I can honestly say the maximum I’ve ever studied for any paper would be 4 hours before – much less than the countless weeks and months that the winners would spend on. I wasn’t the only one in class though – I’ve known tons of people who wouldn’t touch a book.
Once again, the answer is true fear of failure, as opposed to an addiction to failure. If I screwed up, there’s nobody to sympathise with me. The winners know as well as I do that most courses don’t have a whole lot of content that requires studying for weeks and months, but their sympathysers are the ones who really require to see them study for weeks and months so that when they screw up, they are assured of another sympathy fix, “Aww… you poor dear. You studied so hard. It’s alright, there’s nothing more you could have done!”
I’ve noticed this most commonly in humans. If they are assured they have no shoulder to cry on, their decisions are inherently rational and objective, than if they knew they had someone’s shoulders to cry on. When you know you have nobody on your side, you give up the sham of “hard work” and really begin working hard because you start focussing on what you want as opposed to what you need to prove in order to get sympathy. You really start exploring all your options. You become desperate because you’re afraid. You really end up doing all you could possibly do.
I noticed this in exams and I notice this in all the different companies where my friends talk about promotions, pay raises, whatever. Those who’re really afraid, just do whatever it takes and are happy when they get it. Others will do everything else except what their evaluators are looking for and will keep cribbing year after year about how they’re stagnating, because actually getting what they want would be detrimental to their sympathy-fix.
Part of why I had to verbalise this is that I began to realise I was falling in the same trap lately – especially in the last six months. When life becomes too easy, and you find yourself surrounded by people who won’t tell you you suck, its time to shake things up a bit!
I just idled an hour away questioning myself on these lines. This couldn’t have come at a more appropriate time!
You make some compelling arguments here. I’d sort of forgotten how seductive pity can be.
Also, somehow, it isn’t very pleasant to realise that fear is a large part of what drives me to do what I do, but the more I think about it, the more sense it makes. You call this the ‘real’ fear of failing and I have to admit I do fear this. One problem with this is that one’s definition of failure is hardly ever static. A larger problem is that one feels that ideally, the catalyst for ‘real’ success ought to be something more noble, something higher, than fear. Everything boils down to why we do what we do. I sense I’m about to start rambling so I’ll stop.
There were a couple of points I wanted to add, though – points that are in some ways implicit to what you have said; but bringing them to the surface might help taking this discussion further.
One:
I’ve always felt I was lucky to have grown up in a family that never forced me into doing anything. No compulsory tuitions, saying prayers everyday, studying for x hours everyday, behaving in a particular way before certain people – I had none of that. Therefore, I may not be qualified to make the following statement but my gut says it’s true: The children who are victims of the kind of compulsive parental behavior you describe, become, at some point in their lives, equally responsible for turning into the kind of people they turn into. Your article seems to put the entire blame on the parents, although I’m certain you don’t feel that way.
Two:
A comment on
” If they are assured they have no shoulder to cry on, their decisions are inherently rational and objective, than if they knew they had someone’s shoulders to cry on. ” :
I get the feeling this sort of inherently rational, objective (more aware, more sensible, importantly, more honest) thinking stems more from the (initially frightening) realisation that even if a sympathetic shoulder were available, it would only be an escape route that led to even more decadence. At the risk of sounding immodest I’ll go so far as to say I’ve begun to deliberately avoid such potential shoulders. Maybe because, as you say, I’ve realised that they only set you off on the path to real failure.
This chain of thought afflicts me regularly, but I never got around to writing about it. I’m glad you did.
Incidentally, I’ve never felt this good about being called a loser
Comment by Srijan Deshpande — June 15, 2009 @ 8:08 pm
Thanks for bringing out the two points.
On one, I actually screwed up there. Sleep deprivation isn’t good for blogging. The entry did begin with recapping what parents do, and what I really wanted to move on to was the fact that these “kids” I’m talking about are in our age range (22 – 28 years old.) You brought out exactly what I wanted to convey – that no matter what parents did, even after becoming adults, the kids themselves display the same symptoms. They may be miserable and frustrated, but they won’t take the risk of finding happiness because they are haunted by ghosts of their past.
On point two, I never really thought of the shoulder until a few days ago, after almost six months, I realised that I was right in the middle of the trap. I was caught in it and getting sucked in day by day. Hence the whole blog about being a loser back in FC which was a blessing in disguise. Man our batch was perhaps filled with the most ignored and underappreciated people, and it forced me to compete really hard to get noticed. One of the problems of being “successful” lately was that I was getting my daily dose of sympathy, and the more I got it, the more I wanted. A week ago I realised just how hard I had made it for myself to recover.
I’m now taking the path you were smart enough to take earlier – that of avoiding potential shoulders. Life seems full of possibilities and opportunities the minute you let go of the shoulder, and also a lot more frightening. As Jean-Luc Picard would say, “It is exploring the unknown that fascinates me.”
Comment by archisgore — June 16, 2009 @ 8:14 am
My friend you bring up a very important issue. This is very common scene (i think) in our country. We become habitual to these things or we move in same circular way. It is really difficult to move out of this circle unless you make a big change. Most of the time you come out of this through friends, like he ask you come to his city for change and/or to look new opportunities there. That helps to restart everything from beginning.
Now we have talked abt failure, now I want to talk abt success. We also measure success from others points like money, fame..etc. We just follow society’s definition of success. For me success is about doing whatever you want and living the life as you like not as what others want.
Comment by Sharique — June 19, 2009 @ 6:59 pm