What Balance

Alexander Lane

I have what is called performance anxiety, or what my dad once referred to as ‘overwhelming narcissism’. As far as mental health conditions go, I’d personally say it ranks very low, probably next to my fear of birds, in terms of how much it affects me. But I have opened with this for a reason. It is because a thought that has bounced around my normally quite empty skull for some time is that we, as a society, suffer from performance anxiety.

To me, I would define performance anxiety as evaluating oneself in terms of external factors. I’m sure there is a proper, medical definition somewhere, but I can’t be bothered to find it right now. No, for me performance anxiety is about thinking of yourself almost purely in terms of your achievements, of craving the validation that comes with standing out, with being, as our parents call us, perfect. When I say that our society suffers from performance anxiety, I mean to say that we have become too obsessed with our external indicators. We care too much about having a distinguished job, or a nice car, or appearing as if we have the ideal life. For us university students, this performance anxiety manifests as a pressure to stand out academically, and through our extra-curriculars.

The particular bone that I have to pick today is with these extra-curriculars. Not, of course, with their existence itself. How could I? I am, after all, writing an essay for the student paper. My bone, more specifically, is on the pressure that we face to participate in extra-curriculars, not because we enjoy ANU Snowsports beach benders (paradoxical, right?), but so that we remain competitive potential employees. Even writing that phrase feels slightly soul-killing. When did university become so focused on jobs? However wankish or naff, I rather like the idea that university should be first about learning, second about contributing to the bank of human knowledge, and third about perfecting our eye roll for law students. Instead, the pressure to land a graduate gig in our desired field has trickled down into pressure on first years like me to achieve HD’s and to put their hand up for every role anywhere they can, if only so that they can add another page onto their CV.

This is not me accusing anyone else, by the way. I am not throwing down some metaphorical, roundabout gauntlet. This is, if anything, me projecting myself onto everyone else. Overwhelming narcissism doesn’t sound so farfetched now, does it?

Yet, I do think it is undeniable that students face an incredible amount of pressure to standout. And it is undeniable that we only have two options for this: excellent grades, and these extracurricular activities. I believe that while the vast majority of people are motivated by a desire for simple pleasure, and that for them, extracurriculars are fun. But I do also think a lot of us are motivated by the employability that extracurricular roles bring with them. It may be a repressed motivation, but it is still there. And, I think it equally important that we begin to accept and discuss this. We cannot blame ourselves for how we have been conditioned by society. But we can try to overcome that conditioning, and that will only ever begin with admitting that this exists. Maybe, we could get a circle of chairs as well, and each of us could take turns introducing ourselves and saying how long it’s been since we did something for future employment.

This pressure is problematic, it leads to burnout. It leads to a worry that you’re not doing enough. That by not doing something, you’ve already set up your future life, and closed one career opportunity because someone else will have something more impressive. It sounds irrational, I know. But that is the problem with anxiety, individual or on a community level. It is irrational. None of us need to get HDs to get our degree, nor does it say anything about anyone if they do things (or not) outside of university. No one should have to work themselves into the ground simply for a graduate position at some firm. While we all know this, it doesn’t help. Because the problem doesn’t begin with us. We may, inadvertently, put pressure on ourselves and on others. But the problem itself stems from society, and from aspects of Anglo culture. Not to mention the nature of capitalism. Ah, hold on, I think I just heard SAlt knock on my door.

While there are all sorts of immediate consequences to this employability anxiety, there is one long term consequence that worries me. That it never ends. We are, I would hazard, the first generation to be raised wholly in this atmosphere that drums ‘employability’ into our heads non-stop, followed shortly thereafter by ‘You’ll likely have 6-7 jobs in your lifetime’. And what if, once we graduate, it simply becomes the loop that we’re stuck in? That to stand out, to retain that unreachable, unknowable employability, we work ourselves from the cradle to the grave. We are, to some extent, already seeing it. The younger workforce, only a few years ahead of us, are working increasingly irregular hours, despite holding professional jobs. All my life I have watched my parents work more and more on weekends and nominal holidays- a phenomenon shared by many other professionals, and one which has only been exacerbated by COVID-19. Not only are we working more hours, we also work longer, with more people opting to retire later; as more money is needed to support oneself over a longer retirement period than ever before. The workforce participation rate for those of retirement age in Australia has increased by 22 percent since 2000. Higher costs of living and waning social welfare have given many people much anxiety over their financial future. This wouldn’t exist if we didn’t insist on pushing everyone to work more and more. That is what seems to be at the heart of this. Despite all our advancements in productivity and technology, we insist that people should be working more, not less. And this comes at a time when we ought to seek to work less. What is the point of society if not to, through collective cooperation, provide more leisure for each person than they could hope to achieve alone. Utopian as it may sound, if we don’t aim for anywhere, we won’t get anywhere, and we’ll simply continue to dawdle along this overworked, overstressed path that we’ve put ourselves on.

This brings us back to university. The nature of our workforce today bears down onto us as students, even if we don’t always make the link consciously. We know that finding a job is only getting more and more competitive, which leads to anxiety over remaining a good potential employee. I don’t have a well-thought out solution to this. I think it’s much more helpful instead to write about the problem and then sit back feeling accomplished. The only thing I can offer is collective therapy. We ought to discuss this more, not just the overworking but the unnatural competition we form between ourselves and the idea that our purpose is to work. They’re big questions and questions with a century or so of literature discussing them. But as the future leaders of Australia (that’s another dry-heave inducing phrase) we should fashion our own solution to the problem, unique to the context in which it occurs. The next question thenis: Who will pay for the very big couch that we can lie head to toe on for this collective therapy? therapising?