Tired of being impressive – When success becomes a performance we can no longer put down

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Blessing Nyahuma

ON Sunday, the workers at the farm beckoned me to join them. We played drafts. Then Crazy Eights. Then they per­suaded me to dance to contempo­rary music whose lyrics and move­ments I hardly understood. By every measure of productivity, we accomplished nothing.

And I had a wonderful time.

Later that evening, driving home, something unsettled me. Nothing that was going wrong at the farm had changed.

The problems were still there. Our numbers were still not good. The work waiting for tomorrow was still waiting. Yet I was happy.

What disturbed me more was not that I had somehow discovered that the farm workers had happier lives than mine. It was that, for those few hours, they seemed better able than I was to inhabit life without requir­ing the moment to accomplish any­thing else.

We had wasted time.

And perhaps that was precisely why it felt so good.

When I arrived home, I opened Facebook, and there it was, the end­less procession of achievement.

A graduation gown. A wedding photograph. Another new car given out, its keys held towards the cam­era like a trophy.

A promotion announced in the modesty of someone who is de­lighted but does not want to appear too delighted. Another award. An­other conference. Another building. Another milestone.

Within minutes, the congratula­tions arrive.

Well deserved.

So proud of you.

More wins.

“Wadadisa.”

Social media is excellent at ap­plause. What it is less suited to ask­ing is the uncomfortable question beneath the applause:

Are you becoming happy, or merely becoming impressive?

I am not in anyway against social media. Social media did not invent the distance between how a life looks and how it feels. It merely gave that distance a stage, an audi­ence and an archive.

The problem is about the differ­ence between formation and perfor­mance. It is the difference between becoming a person and constructing a person whom other people will recognise as successful.

The sociologist Erving Goffman described social life through the language of theatre.

Human beings occupy front re­gions in which performances must be maintained and back regions where those performances can be relaxed, contradicted or prepared.

There is nothing dishonest about this. Social life requires roles.

A surgeon should behave differ­ently in an operating theatre from how she behaves around the dinner table. The problem begins when there is nowhere left in life where the dominant performance can be put down.

The problem is not that life has a stage. It is that some of us have for­gotten how to leave it.

Psychology offers another way of understanding the problem.

Self-discrepancy theory distin­guishes between the person we be­lieve ourselves actually to be, the person we would ideally like to be­come, and the person we believe we ought to be.

The tensions between these selves can have emotional conse­quences. The theory becomes par­ticularly revealing when the “ought” self becomes crowded with bor­rowed expectations.

The career one should have. The neighbourhood one should live in. The marriage one should display. The car one should drive. The body one should have. The success one should be seen enjoying.

Eventually the central question changes. We stop asking, “Who am I becoming?”

We begin asking, “Am I becom­ing convincing?”

Hegel takes the problem even deeper when he suggests that Hu­man identity is never constructed entirely in private. We become selves partly through recognition.

We need other human beings to applaud and acknowledge us.

Recognition is therefore not sim­ply vanity. It is part of human for­mation and socialisation.

The problem is not that we want recognition, but that recognition be­comes detached from formation. We have now mastered the accumu­lation of the symbols through which society recognises success while remaining privately unconvinced by the person receiving them.

That is the tragedy of performa­tive success. Other people may be­lieve the performance, while the performer increasingly depends upon their belief. Recognition with­out formation eventually becomes performance.

Consider how easily this hap­pens. The pastor must appear per­manently victorious because the congregation has quietly confused spirituality with invulnerability.

The marriage must continue sur­viving photographically at wed­dings, anniversaries and family gatherings even when it has stopped surviving relationally.

The executive must perform cer­tainty because the organisation has promoted the version of him that never appears confused.

Eventually the image becomes expensive to maintain.

I am not against achievement. A doctorate is good. Money is useful.

A beautiful home is a legitimate thing to desire. Promotion matters. Recognition matters. Excellence matters. Credentials are not the ene­my. Visibility is not necessarily van­ity, nor is reputation necessarily hy­pocrisy.

The problem begins when achievement is recruited into the manufacture of identity and asked to answer a question it was never designed to answer.

Who am I?

A qualification cannot finally an­swer that. Neither can money. Nei­ther can applause. Society can con­fer status, but society can also withdraw it, reprice it or forget it. Those who say “Hosanna in the highest” at the triumphal entry may also cry, “Crucify him.”

A self built entirely from with­drawable materials will always re­main insecure, however impressive its exterior.

When people learn to perform confidence instead of practising competence, organisations eventu­ally place impressive people inside problems their performances cannot solve.

Leaders who cannot admit un­certainty often create cultures in which everyone beneath them learns to imitate certainty.

What begins as a psychological problem eventually becomes a gov­ernance problem.

The solution, however, is not to start performing humility.

Modesty theatre is still theatre.

The challenge is harder.

It is to bring the person onstage and the person backstage into great­er conversation. It means choosing some achievements because they genuinely belong to our under­standing of a worthwhile life, rather than because they photograph well.

It means occasionally disap­pointing audiences that will never carry the cost of our exhaustion.

And perhaps this is what that ap­parently wasted evening at the farm taught me.

Nothing had improved. No prob­lem had disappeared. Nobody pro­moted me. Nobody applauded me. No photograph from that evening was going to strengthen a profes­sional profile.

We played drafts. We played cards. We danced badly. We laughed.

For a few hours, I enjoyed being alive without needing the moment to prove anything about me.

Perhaps maturity begins when we stop asking whether our lives are impressive enough to be watched and begin asking whether they are meaningful enough to be lived.

Success should enlarge the self, not require its disappearance.

Because eventually the photo­graphs will have been taken. The titles will be removed. The guests will go home. The applause will stop.

And one of the finest achieve­ments in life may simply be this:

When nobody is watching, you still want to be the person who re­mains.

lNyahuma is a Germany-based Zimbabwean public intellectual. His writing explores Human Devel­opment, the Psychology of Leader­ship, Family Life and the Forma­tion of Character, examining the deeper human questions behind so­ciety’s greatest challenges