Our Obsession With Exceptionalism is Killing Us
An exploration of success culture and the pressure to optimize our lives through achievement, impact, and monetization.
The pressure to succeed
I write a lot about the pressure to succeed, and there’s good reason for it. We live in a system obsessed with exceptionalism: the expectation that we optimize our lives through achievement, impact, and monetization.
From day dot, we are indoctrinated by meritocracy and shaped by productivity. We are compared to our peers and ushered down different lanes depending on our strengths and weaknesses (our “potential”).
And if we fail to live up to our potential? To make something — anything — of ourselves?
We become redundant (or so it seems). And that’s a shame none of us would like to face.
But many of us face it anyway (the shame of underachieving). For the greater our obsession with success, the more intimate we become with failure.
Like many, I feel this burden — the pressure to achieve, to become, to earn my place.
Only the extraordinary seems to matter. And it’s killing us.
The seduction of potential
Potential is a promising concept… at first. For some (like me) it acts as both the saviour and the executioner.
As a young adult, it gave me hope, catapulting me 17,400km across the globe to chase my dreams. I was thrilled by the prospect that I could do, be, and have anything I set my sights on.
But there’s a dark side: We must achieve in order for our life to justify itself. So when life inevitably happens and roadblocks materialize, we take it to heart. Setbacks become a personal failing.
For 10 years, I did everything they said. I moved to a big city, got a good education, graduated top of my class. Entering the work force, I produced my own work, sent emails and invitations to industry professionals, took regular classes and workshops. I ran a half-marathon. In my downtime, I engaged with podcasts and courses that optimized my mind for success.
When I got stuck, I moved to a new city, a bigger industry — one that promised even more potential. I kept this up, year after year…
And then I hit a wall. I just couldn’t do it anymore.
For years, I’d hustled in pursuit of a version of me that I had been promised existed just beyond the horizon of hard work and courage. But she wasn’t arriving. There was no wealth, notoriety, or sense of fulfilment. If anything, I was exhausted.
That’s when the shame became loud.
The torture of self-optimization
Burned out and increasingly disillusioned, despair found me. The tower of expectations I lived with had slowly crumbled, and each fallen brick became a weighty reminder of my inability to make it happen.
I had done everything right.
But something was missing.
New Age Psychology had taught me enough about self-responsibility and “thoughts become things” that I concluded it must be me.
If success wasn’t happening through productivity, perhaps it needed to happen through mindset.
I doubled down on self-optimization: unblocking subconscious patterns of thought, visualizing outcomes, and other forms of mindset and manifestation work.
However, this quickly turned into hyper self-monitoring. I’d wake with anxiety, mentally mapping a morning routine that I believed I needed in order to deserve the future I wanted. Tools that once soothed me — meditation, journaling — became tasks that had to be completed in order for me to feel I was optimized. Meanwhile, career rejections and missed opportunities became evidence of a shitty mindset and bad personal energy.
Whether following a method of productivity or mindset optimization, I kept circling the same message: I’m the reason it’s not working. And that broke me.
Meritocracy, manifestation, and human potential systems all sell us the same idea: Do it right, and you’ll succeed — you’ll live an exceptional life. And if you don’t — it’s on you.
But is it?
I’ve come to see that effort, talent, and mindset aren’t always enough. More than that, my worth has long been defined by my ability to succeed.
This got me thinking — why does it matter to be extraordinary at all?
Our addiction to meaning-making
Understanding the obsession I had with fulfilling my potential brought me to a very simple but very human fear: the need for my life to mean something.
After realizing the burden of personal responsibility that I had been carrying, I pulled back on my need to self-optimize. My days became simpler: finding joy through reading a book, or prioritizing moments of connection with my partner or a friend.
But this didn’t stop the underlying panic — the idea that simple wasn’t enough.
I found myself relentlessly oriented towards meaning-making and future planning. There was a pull to turn my weekly jogs into training for a running event, or figure out how to monetize my blog.
But this is the system we live within — one that expects us to have a 5-year plan promising increasing growth and impact. A society that worships the extraordinary and ignores — if not shames — those living ordinary lives.
There is a lot I’ve built for myself in place of self-optimization — slow mornings, creative output without an audience, low-impact part-time work — but I just can’t shake the feeling that I’ve failed. Without something to show for myself, my life feels meaningless.
Imagine the degree of societal brainwashing it takes to make simplicity feel like failure.
Reclaiming the ordinary
Chasing success is relatively harmless until it spills over into a hierarchy of worth.
Our obsession with celebrity is evidence that visibility equals superiority — that some of us are winners and those who fall below mean less.
Is that what it all boils down to — popularity? Winning?
In truth, there are millions of us out here quietly achieving — arguably with the same level of soul and impact as those who have “made it.”
When optimization is the narrative we push — especially through the lens of popularity — millions of us get left behind, too unexceptional in the eyes of society to mean much. It’s painful, stressful, and damaging.
Here is where exceptionalism risks becoming performative self-actualization out of fear that we amount to nothing without something to hold on to.
But is Oprah really more actualized than our neighbour who lives a quiet life (an ordinary life)? Does Adele really have more value than the street musician I love listening to outside the Granville Island Market?
We fear that we will die unseen, having never properly justified our existence. But I’ll argue that our obsession with exceptionalism kills our spirit before we even come close to the end. It causes us to bypass the moments of connection, presence, and joy that truly matter.
What if exceptionalism is just a facade — and ordinary is actually enough?
If this resonated, I’d love to hear from you. You can reply directly to this email or leave a comment below.
A voice for all of us Sarah! We’re going to get “it” one of these days. Apparently it’s a process 😉❤️