ACHIEVEMENT ADDICTION

Models: Ayomide Adebambo, Yebin Kim, Gabriel Trusovas

According to Dr. Justine Toh, if you’re an achievement addict, even being asked to describe yourself is torturous.

“I’m used to describing myself according to my work,” she explained searching for a good answer.

“I’m a communicator at heart. I grew up in Sydney. I have had the whole tiger parenting experience thing – my parents were Chinese Malaysian migrants to Australia. I have a big love of film and TV. And I have a family.”

Justine is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity (CPX), a not-for-profit media company that offers a Christian perspective on contemporary life. When asked if that means her job title is ‘Public Christian’, Justine laughed and said, “That’s such a hideous label.”

“We’re really just trying to carve out a place in the public conversation where we can acknowledge the existence of the transcendent or of God and how that plays a role in our lives,” she explained.

Justine is also the author of the newly released Achievement Addiction – a short book that is the third in CPX’s Re:Considering series.

In Achievement Addiction, Justine identifies the ways our society has long been obsessed with hard-won success – from Australia’s fixation on winning gold at the Olympics to competitive reality TV shows, to our obsession with tracking daily steps through Fitbit.

Inspired by psychotherapist Carl Jung’s exchange of letters with Bill Wilson, (co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous), she draws attention to how we strive for significance and the price we pay when we identify our worth with our work.

For Justine, achievement addiction is a personal battle – but the book isn’t an autobiography by any means.

“The main idea of the book is to help people see that all of us live in a world where we’re encouraged to think our worth in life boils down to our achievements and the work we do,” she said. “I have a very particular experience of this because my parents, being Asian migrant parents, were really interested in setting my sister and I up for life in this new land of Australia. They felt the best way they could do [that] was to help us get into selective schools so we could get into university.”

“So, there was a big stress on doing well academically, and that has basically shaped my life since I was a teenager.”

Justine said her parent’s approach makes total sense given how migrants often find themselves without the social connections to place their children where good opportunities are.

But it is not only migrants who have formative experiences like this.

“I want us to acknowledge the whole world we live in is all driven by our performance.”

“Look at social media – it’s all about traffic. We talk about how it’s a giant popularity contest, and it definitely is. But social media is also something where if you’re prepared to work really hard – be all over your profile, post constantly to keep up your engagement with your fans – then you can expect it will pay off in certain ways, with good promotional opportunities, lots of followers, lots of shares, etc.”

But avoiding the unofficial performance measures of social media does not make us immune to our achievement-addicted world.

There are official performance review systems with tick boxes designed to plot your potential and performance. Score well, and you get a pay rise or promotion. Fail to score well, and you might find the HR department called in to address the “issue”.

“It’s just so deeply embedded in our lives that you, we don’t even realise it’s there. It’s like every day you’re on trial to demonstrate your worth. And you can start to think that you are nothing if you can’t.”

As a result, you find yourself pointing to your CV. Or perhaps your looks – particularly if you’re a woman.

So, is achievement addiction a contemporary problem?

Justine thinks it might be. The idea that your worth is in your work has certainly always plagued humanity. But, when society was more stratified and social mobility was less possible, there might have been less pressure.

In today’s society, we attempt to even out the metaphorical playing field so that everyone can thrive. The subtext is: if you don’t succeed, that’s on you.

“The message is that your input equals output, right?” Justine said. “And if we’re living in a society of equal opportunity like that, then it really is on you to make something of yourself in life.”

This is amazing if you happen to succeed. But what do you tell the losers of the situation? That they didn’t try hard enough?

“It weirdly obscures all the different ways you might’ve been privileged in the first place. Like, in what society does equal opportunity actually exist? It’s very deceptive because it obscures all the ways that you might’ve been given a leg up, so to speak.”

COVID-19 and the cultural shifts that came with it have increased the stress associated with striving to achieve for many people, asking them to add tasks to their lives while shouldering the stress of a disrupted world. Justine said the tension has been good for her, but she still has a long way to go.

“I’m nervous about writing this book because I haven’t been cured or achieved victory over my achievement addiction.” She does not want to be cast as a poster girl when still in the battle.

She said even rest can be challenging for an achievement addict, admitting that it makes her feel miserable. But she can sense God drawing her to work out what rest means in her next season.

“It’s hideously frightening,” she said. “You give me a problem, I’ll work out the steps, and I’ll work towards solving it. But if life is about asking the right questions, as my colleague Mark Stephens says, and the question is, ‘What does rest look like?’...Well, that frightens me.”

“You can’t ace that sort of test. And in some ways, it’s even worse to ask this as a Christian, because you’re really asking, ‘What does grace look like?’ Or, ‘What is grace?’ And that’s Christianity 101.” For creative types, the desire to achieve is complex.

“You’re not getting paid – or not paid very well – to do this, and you’re relying upon the strength of your own passion. And the passion is supposed to separate the real hardcore people from the amateurs. And you only feel as good as the last thing that you did that. That’s very difficult to have to juggle and manage.”

But what can we all do to avoid becoming addicted to achievement?

Justine said finding a mentor who is a little further down the path is essential for perspective. Also important is practising gratitude and spending time in prayer.

And taking time to set boundaries is necessary.

“Boundaries are really hard, especially for young people today. But they’re incredibly important.”

There is plenty of wisdom about boundaries to be found in the Bible – beginning on the first page.

“Look at Genesis 1, the creation narrative. See how the work of creation is a process of boundarymaking,” Justine advised. “In some ways, it’s about establishing boundaries into which various forms of life can thrive.”

“It does not teach us that creating something means starting with a blank slate and working until you drop. We’ve all got to cultivate habits and practices that are boundaried in nature so that we won’t be overtaken by our work.”

For more on Justine and CPX’s work, go to publicchristianity.org