The Subtle Madness of Striving in the Modern World

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Many of my client’s struggle with indecisiveness surrounding their life, relationships and work. Maybe you can relate with the cognitive dissonance of wanting more out of life, despite what you already have:

On one hand…

I have “enough”. I have a house, and a job and food. I have water and electricity and wifi. I have a couple of friends, or at least a hobby. All things considered, things are fine. My basic needs are all but taken care of. On paper, things are good.

On the other hand…

Things don’t quite feel “good enough”. I could make more money, but I could also lose my job at any time. I have debts that I need to pay, or at the very least, need enough money for rent or some potential emergency I can’t foresee. I can’t work on my dreams, goals or passions because I’m too tired at the end of the day and burned out. I need a vacation but I don’t have PTO. I waste entirely too much time on things that don’t matter.

More and more people are stuck in the gap between “surviving” and “thriving”.

The Striving Gap is the space between having your basic needs met and feeling secure enough to let your guard down and invest your time and energy into things other than continuing to hustle or grind.

You could technically take some time off, but time is money. You could spend more time with hobbies and leisure, but maybe you should just keep studying for the next certification or up-skilling or growing. You make enough money that your bills are paid, but not enough to fund your retirement, afford the bazillion different kinds of insurances and build any kind of wealth — so better keep pushing for that next promotion.

You feel stress that it’s not “good enough” but you also feel guilty that you aren’t more grateful and satisfied with what you do have. You are pulled between just trying to appreciate what you have now and enjoying the present and continuing to delay gratification to invest in making life continually better.

This is like running a race but not knowing how far you are running or even where the finish line is.

If it’s a 100 meter dash then you should definitely sprint! You don’t need to pace yourself, you should go full-throttle towards your goal. But If it’s a marathon then sprinting at the beginning will just exhaust you before you complete your first mile. Since you don’t know how long the race is you don’t know if you should speed up or pace yourself. All you know is that you need to keep going.

You see, people who are stuck in survival mode or have ascended to thriving both know how long their race is. Those in survival mode are running sprints. They just need to figure out the next rent payment, the next pay check, and where they are going to get food this week. Those who are thriving are running marathons. They are thinking about wealth over decades, investments, retirement funds and generational wealth — what they will pass on to their children.

When you know the distance of your race, you can pace yourself accordingly.

But not knowing the distance is so fundamentally disorienting that it inspires a unique kind of modern neurosis — constantly asking yourself “am I going fast enough? Should I speed up, lock-in and full-send it?” or “Am I going too fast? Should I slow down and pace myself?”

And it doesn’t matter how fast or slow you are going, you can always technically ask this same question. It has no answer.

The only way that the question goes away is if striving collapses into either surviving or thriving. Those who are striving might call the fall from striving to surviving failure, while the ascendance from striving to thriving is, success.

This, too, is contentious — but in a way that only continues to add to the subtle discontent of the Striving individual.

“Why can’t I just be happy with meeting my basic needs? Do I need to be famous, or rich, or have a legacy or get that next promotion or be well known in my field or be an expert or… [insert your ideal outcome here] to be happy!?” If ideals of success and failure are cultural and contextual judgement that are relative and subject to change! Who am I to say that a modest life of meeting my basic needs is somehow less than luxury and riches? Perhaps we’ve got it all wrong and it’s a more simple way of living that is in fact the more fulfilling and all of these expectations of wealth and excess are not only distracting us but making us increasingly miserable? HOW FAST AM I SUPPOSED TO RUN, DAMMIT!?

Those who are striving cannot reasonably trust their own determinations of the “right” or “wrong” way to live life, and this lack of certainty amounts to an insatiable searching. Searching for answers, guidance, or strategy — watching news. Google searching. Social media scrolling. Tiktoking and now? Petitioning the simulated wisdom of artificial intelligence.

Something that is insatiable, by definition, cannot be satisfied.

To that end, those who are stuck in striving live life with a chronic sense of dissatisfaction.

But it just so happens that those who are chronically dissatisfied are also very productive. They work hard. They hustle. They consume. They are willing to invest. They are innovative and entrepreneurial. They get their hands dirty with the trial and error of life.

Hypothetically, if I was in charge of running a system that was dependent on productivity and consumption, I would want to put as many people in the “Striving” gap as possible and keep them there. They would be the fuel in the engine of such a system.

However, this is also the modern condition that drives a great many sociological and psychological processes. Increases in rates of anxiety and depression, chronic loneliness, burnout. Increased stock market gains despite increased personal and ballooning national debt. Political bifurcation between urban and rural areas and increasingly polarized political rhetoric. Birth rates declining the more a country develops. The rich getting richer while the poor gets poorer.

All the result of a collective increase in striving.

The counter-intuitive summary is this — the harder we try as a collective, the less tolerable life becomes.

Escaping the Trap of Indefinite Striving

Modern striving is it’s own subtle madness that slowly erodes at our individual mental health and our collective quality of life, despite the fact that our efforts at striving are often motivated by a desire to make things “better”.

The problem is not striving itself, but rather, the existential uncertainty that it inspires.

We can’t use logic to reason our way out of this uncertainty. In fact, the only way out of this trap is through something absurd.

Pick a strategy and commit to it, even if you don’t know if it’s the right one.

Right or wrong can only be truly appraised in retrospect. Thus, you must accept the reality that you cannot possibly know before you try, and dedicate yourself to a single process for months, or perhaps even years, to see what will happen.

This is the “Only-one-way-to-find-out” method of resolving existential angst associated with striving. It is both true, and illogical at the same time, making it fundamentally absurd.

An existential crisis, then, is when you inevitably attempt to judge the effectiveness of the process you committed to and ask the question, “should I stick with his process, or try a different one”.

Many will ask the question, “how do I know which one to pick”. But this is the wrong question — one that implies that there might be some logic or reason that you can use to inform your decision. But this is not an issue you can intellectualize your way through.

Absurdity is also it’s own kind of madness.

Telling someone to pick a path and follow it, even if it’s chosen entirely randomly or based on subjective intuition or “vibes”, no doubt betrays our desire for neat and tidy logical answer.

But in reality, there is only really ONE choice you need to make:

1. The madness of constantly considering what you should do, without ever arriving at a satisfying answer.
2. The madness of choosing something haphazardly and seeing it through, regardless of whether or not it’s the right choice.

They are both madness, so, pick your problem wisely!

Those who are striving are in one state or another until one day they either fall back into survival or ascend to thriving. But at the very least, through dedication to a practice or a discipline, you can temporarily mitigate the feeling of uncertainty and dissatisfaction.

Is it the right thing to do? Who knows! But only one way to find out.