Performance-Based Love
The dangers of always doing
For most of my life, I always felt like I had to be doing something.
Being busy was good. Goofing off was lazy. Productivity was my only purpose. Around the age of 18, everyone suddenly started asking, “what do you do?” It was almost like society whispered, stop playing, you’re not a kid anymore.
15 months ago at an IHOP in Boulder, I experienced this exhaustive emphasis on doing. Sitting across from my parents and their plates of pancakes, I dumped a decision on them: I wanted to leave college.
This broke their brains. After all, I had all A’s. I finally found some friends. I was on the prestigious path of pre-med, passing up my twenties to wear a white coat and a promiscuous pager. I knew that I no longer wanted to be a doctor, but I was still dragging myself in that direction.1
So next they naturally asked me: “well what are you going to do?”
I tried to explain my idea of being an online writer and entrepreneur, but it didn’t make any sense to them (or even me). I knew that it felt right, even if I couldn’t explain it with legible logic.
But the scary thing was that I interpreted their question with a story that I’d been told from society: I need to do something to show that I’m a worthy human being.
Too Busy to Feel
I felt forced to get a job right away and just do stuff, even though I didn’t have to. But there was some smothered part of me saying, “Hold up, look what you just did! Let’s take some time to sit the fuck down and decompress after this decision. School has been the most stable aspect of your identity and self-worth since learning spelling in 4th grade!”
But I didn’t.
I distanced myself from myself by doing. I was too busy to feel.
So I stayed in Boulder for a few weeks. I shadowed a shift at an Argentinian restaurant, washing dishes and telling them to speak slower Spanish. I made flyers for my tutoring business that I taped on top of the urinals in the chemistry lecture hall. I stuffed my cerebrum with Alex Hormozi’s sales lectures. I tried to make money on Twitter as a health coach with 38 followers.
All while suppressing my own silent screams.
Something I didn’t really tell anyone was that those were some dark, depressing days. I burned out and became bedridden with a fever. I remember ignoring texts from friends and family, feeling helpless. I told some guy on Twitter that I really did struggle with feeling like I was enough. I texted my mom: “I’m really hard on myself.”
By feeling forced to go right into “doing” mode, I thought that I would only be loved if I was doing something. As if chilling out and coming home after leaving college was somehow corrupt.
“What Should We Tell Our Friends?”
Last month at Danny Miranda’s men’s retreat in Austin, Danny told me that he sensed shame when I said the words, “dropped out.” It was true. He was right. In the story I’d been telling myself, I thought that my parents didn’t support me. I knew that they supported me financially—but not emotionally. I convinced myself that they didn’t have conviction in me. I even felt like my Dad was disappointed in me for not becoming a doctor.2
Then I felt the shame spread when my parents asked me another question: “What should we tell our friends?”
A part of me thought, what do you mean, tell your friends? Is what I’ve done wrong? They seriously seemed worried about what they should tell other people about what their son was doing.3
Another part of me laughed and thought, wait, how old are you? It sounded tantamount to teenage behavior. It was almost like, “Dad, I have a tiny penis. What should I tell my friends?” Or, “Mom, I have a tomato-sized zit in the middle of my forehead. What will my friends think?” Was it really that big of a deal?
Whether it was or whether it wasn’t, I still struggled.
“What Do You Want To Do With That?”
When I told people I was a college student studying pre-med and Integrative Physiology at CU Boulder, I felt comfortable in that identity. It was respectable. It sounded impressive. But then after dropping out and driving home to live with my parents, I met a guy at a cafe. He happened to be a medical student. I told him I was a writer. Then he asked, “Well what do you want to do with that?”4
I felt myself frown on the inside. I felt insecure. I couldn’t really explain how the path worked because it didn’t have a template—so therefore it was less acceptable to this stranger. His skepticism also pissed me off, but he was probably just mirroring my own lack of self acceptance.
I’ve met plenty of people in Austin on pathless paths who have seen something similar. When you’re on a different path, it almost seems like you have to explain yourself more and always be doing something. Why? Because in our society, we equate being loved and accepted with doing things that are easily explainable to others.
As Eric Jorgenson wrote in Career Advice for Uniquely Ambitious People:
“The observable parts of your job is what impresses people in bars and makes you sound successful at your high school reunion. Social Status is what drives most people, whether they realize it or not. That is why they are willing to put up with otherwise shitty and miserable circumstances, so they can be impressive.”5
It’s like those Linked-In posts where people say: “Hey everyone, I’m so proud to announce that I just landed an unpaid internship—yes, unpaid—at Harvard this summer. Look at me, I’m really cool. Also, I don’t care if it sucks because it sounds sick. And to make money, I’m gonna get rid of grease at McDonald’s.”
Prestige.
This single word sums up the story. It’s the opinion of other people. It’s about sounding cool. It’s why my parents wanted to know what I was going to do. It’s why they worried about what they’d tell their friends.
But prestige psychologically screwed me. Those questions from my parents made me think that they would love me differently depending on which path I picked. In my mind—no matter how true this actually was—I believed that they loved me less because I left college. I believed that their love for me would change with what I wanted to do.
This is what I call Performance-Based Love.
It’s when we think that we are loved based on external metrics and social status. GPAs, jobs, salaries, colleges, corporations—you name it. Any label. Any expectation. Anything intuitively impressive to society. If you do X, then you will be loved. It’s the sinister message that haunts our subconscious, saying that you will be more “acceptable” if you get A’s in honors classes, head to Harvard, and get a good job at Goldman Sachs than if you quit college to pursue the path of mastery.6
Performance-Based Love is driven by prestige. It’s driven by feeling like we have to do things and have to be someone special. But all these things actually arise from the deepest desire of human beings: to be seen, loved, accepted, and appreciated by others.
Beyond meeting our basic needs, I believe that our society’s over-emphasis on prestige leads a lack of love for others and ourselves, and it’s a massive impediment to happiness in the very visible modern world.
In her powerful 1943 novel The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand wrote:
“Look at everyone around us. You've wondered why they suffer, why they seek happiness and never find it. If any man stopped and asked himself whether he's ever held a truly personal desire, he'd find the answer. He'd see that all his wishes, his efforts, his dreams, his ambitions are motivated by other men. He's not really struggling even for material wealth, but for the second-hander's delusion—prestige. A stamp of approval, not his own.”
So how do we escape the pull of prestige? What’s the antidote for Performance-Based Love? How has my perception of my parents changed since telling them this?
To answer these questions with sufficient depth, I’m making an essay series. Over the past six months, I’ve collected a jungle of juicy quotes and anecdotes about prestige, labels, external validation, and self love. And now I feel called to create. Stay tuned for the next one:
Notes
My parents were also surprised because they weren’t in the dialogue. But the challenge was that if I told them in a casual conversation, “Hey, I’m thinking about considering leaving college,” they probably would’ve wanted me to finish out the semester. So in some sense, I didn’t want them to blow out the flame of my intuition.
Whether this was true or not, it’s not a useful story to believe. After calling my Dad about this, I learned that he wasn’t actually disappointed—he was just shocked at my decision, as he should’ve been. Yet I interpreted it as, “he doesn’t believe in me and is disappointed with my decision.” This led to me resenting him, all because of some stupid story that wasn’t even real!
I have much more compassion for them now. I don’t think any of their friends have sons or daughters on unconventional paths, so I can see how they feel strange that their son is some Internet weirdo. After all, how unsexy is it to say, “umm, he’s living in our basement and writing online” rather than, “he’s going be a doctor.”
Moving to Austin was amazing because people never say stuff like this. People see the power of the Internet and know that you can make a living online doing anything. Nobody here plays silly status slapdick. The only thing they really care about is that you’re actually aligned with your work. Austin whispers two wonderful words: authenticity and alignment.
Jorgenson also wrote that the long game has costs, so you need to have some emotional strength to endure these things: “You’re sacrificing short-term social status (with strangers) for quality of life, a stronger set of skills, and long-term value creation.”
Early on, mastery is low status, which I why I’ve found it useful to compare myself to an athlete. But one problem with this is that professional athletes find their thing extra early, so they’re probably not even old enough to know what status is. Do you think young Wayne Gretzky was stickhandling in his driveway thinking, “man, I sure hope people will like me!” Not likely. All he cared about was not being a bender.
I also adore what Derek Sivers wrote about mastery in his book, How to Live:
"Mastery is the best goal because the rich can't buy it, the impatient can't rush it, the privileged can't inherit it, and nobody can steal it. You can only earn it through hard work. Mastery is the ultimate status."
Thanks to Jack Moses for the title idea and inspiration. Thanks to Danny Miranda for coaching me with questions. Thanks to
for encouraging me to write honestly about what it’s like to leave college. Thanks to my parents for birthing and supporting me.
This painting is gorgeous!
Love your thoughts here, Baxter. Thanks for sharing.