If there’s one thing I’ve observed in the past four years, it’s this: Sleep is a lot like golf. 8 hours is par, and the farther you shoot it, the better your score. Lower than 5? You’re the champion. Break out the venti caramel macchiatos with 6 shots of espresso, it’s time to celebrate the fruits of your labor with three tests, a paper, and seventeen other assignments. Congratulations on your accomplishments.
As students, it’s only natural for us to be busy. We spend eight hours a day in school, then a few more after doing homework, then a couple here and there playing sports or rehearsing for plays or saving the orphans or volunteering, then a few more sleeping. Our days are full, and that’s okay. That’s fantastic, even, because we are far from an apathetic group. We work hard. We make the change.
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Our days are full, but our lives are empty. Rarely do we care about the content of our hours, only their existence, the fulfillment of a quota, the limits of our capacity. Spend the time because you can, because you think you have to, but don’t for one-second think you have a choice. Someone already decided this for you -- and you don’t know who they are, but what matters is that they exist, just like the piles of meaningless work that fill your hours. They exist and you are beholden to their determinations of worth.
You can’t always get what you want, so do as much as you can to fill the void, and brag about your lack of sleep, or the mountains of work you face each night, or how difficult your classes are.
There’s a name for this phenomena, the sort of feedback loop that rewards discontentedness with esteem and views passion as lazy. It’s a martyrdom complex. The more you do and the less you like it, the better off you are.
I see this every day when I walk into school. Of course, we complain about our homework, and sometimes we do lose sleep for studying or for writing papers we procrastinated or for other reasons. We binge watch Gilmore Girls until 3 am. That’s normal. These things, all of them, are normal. The anomaly of the martyrdom complex is the combination of pity and admiration that coexists in the social response to these habits.
We look at the student with six AP classes and five hours of homework each night as a god of sorts, but we never envy their position. We place them on a pedestal of productivity and assure ourselves that this is it, that this is what it means to be intelligent, worthy, good. And we look at ourselves in terms of that standard -- how much more sleep we get than them, how much less homework we have to do. We look through that lens and it distorts us, forces us to see only in terms of the competition, creates more martyrs. The complex is self-perpetuating. Martyr breeds admirer, admirer emulates martyr, and eventually the cycle is so expansive that life itself is anomalous. We set our eyes on becoming both loved and pitied, without realizing it is impossible to be both. If our schedules eat into our sleep, it's cause for celebration. Our stress levels are measures of our success. And even if we recognize the trap of this culture, the constant drive for more content without an equal measure of dedication, it affects us. We may not take the six AP classes, and we sleep 8 hours a night, and we plan and manage and try our best not to fall into the toxicity of the martyrdom complex. But it is always there, before we fall asleep for our full night’s rest, nagging: it isn’t enough.
We don’t have to heed that call. We don’t have to listen to that voice. But its existence will always define us; in some small way, it will distort our views of others or give us pause before we dive into what we love. How much will this take from me? How can I justify it? To what extent must I exaggerate to be perceived as legitimate?
And even if we choose against the complex, even if we ignore the viciousness, it will stay ambient in the background. There is no policy change that will eliminate it. No number of assurances of worth will alleviate it. No amount of good parenting or self-esteem will ever erase its existence.
The martyrdom complex is internal, inherent, omnipresent in every competitive space -- and life itself is a competitive space. There is nothing evil about that competition; in most cases, it pushes us, drives us, makes us healthy. But there is a certain sinister aspect, an unavoidable disorder, in the perception that more work is always better work, that love of a subject or passion or genuine interest cannot coexist with social value. We do not see the intersection of success with passion. They are separate and unequal. In life, the greatest, most frustrating, most beautiful competition of them all, the determination of victory is the discovery of the intersection of the two -- but we have so compartmentalized enjoyment and success that we cannot even fathom that this is the case.
The only way to take back the game, to compete in life as seekers of love and success equally, is to acknowledge that martyrdom has warped it. Sometimes we are well on our way to that evasive but promising confluence; we are pursuing happiness. Sometimes we revert to being martyrs, because it is so easy to seek validation in the pity-reverence of others.
But sometimes we are the shakers, the ones who have the chance to step back and examine the way the game is played, and to change it. It is a decision, and we must make it again and again and again.
Live boldly in everything you do. Because sometimes, living boldly is just living.
