How Being Great Has Failed Us

September is Suicide Prevention Awareness Month.

And thinking about it takes me back to the time when I worked as a therapist in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The clinic I worked at was 15 minutes from Stanford University. So naturally, many of my clients were Stanford students.

On paper, these students had everything a twenty-year-old could want. The school everyone dreams about. Friends envied. Parents who’d saved for decades so their child could sit in those classrooms.

But the students would walk into my office and cry. They were extremely depressed; some were even suicidal.

There’s a phrase Stanford students use.

Duck syndrome. On the surface you glide — calm, easy, effortless. Under the water, your feet are going as fast as they can just to stay afloat. Nobody sees the feet.

What they carried wasn’t sadness. It was the belief that anything less than the best meant they’d failed everyone who sacrificed to get them there. That they weren’t worthy of being there.

But they couldn’t show it because it would confirm they weren’t good enough. So they suffer in silence.

When a young person believes these things, the thoughts that follow can get very dark.

And this isn’t one campus, or one country.

Harvard surveys their students’ mental health each year. Roughly twenty-two percent screened positive for depression last year. One of the highest rates for colleges.

In South Korea, the most common reason for teens wanting to end their lives was school performance and exam pressure. Their teen suicide rate hit the highest level ever recorded in 2023.

In Japan, researchers went back through more than eighteen thousand child suicides across four decades and looked at the calendar. One date stood out above every other: September 1st. The first day back at school.

This generation of young people are the most stressed, anxious, depressed, addicted, and overly medicated of any generation in the past.

Now here’s the part we don’t talk about.

These kids learn that they must be great from their environment. Parental expectations, cultural norms, peer pressure.

Then they grow up. The pressure doesn’t stop — it changes uniforms. The child who had to be great becomes the adult who’s supposed to be great. Same weight. New name.

Because somewhere along the way, we were taught that being great is the measuring stick for whether we’re worth anything. Not being kind. Not being honest. Not being human. Great.

So we spend our lives held against that stick. We compare. We keep quiet score. We look at someone’s marriage, their income, their job, their body, their kids, and decide where we rank. Then we shame ourselves for what we find.

Be great at work. Great at home. A steady provider. A present parent. Fit. Rested. Calm in a crisis. And do it all without complaining, because complaining would mean you can’t handle it.

Nobody handed you that list. You absorbed it. And you measure yourself against it every day.

Then we do the cruellest thing of all. We hand the same list to the people we love.

And the result? We continue the cycle.

The pressure to be great leaves us no room to be human. No room to be tired. No room to be average at something. No room to fail on a Tuesday and try again on a Wednesday.

And when there’s no room to be human, every ordinary struggle feels like proof something is deeply wrong with you.

That’s the lie. And it’s a dangerous one.

Normal is not failure.

Normal is being good at some things and clumsy at others. Loving your partner and being annoyed by them in the same hour. A career that’s fine. A body that’s aging. A marriage that needs work. A week you just got through, and that was enough.

Normal isn’t what happens when you fall short of great. It’s what being human looks like.

So ask yourself: where am I holding a bar so high no living person could reach it? And who am I holding under it?

Then lower it. For them. And, for you. So we can allow ourselves to be human again.

P.S. If you or someone you love is struggling, please don’t sort it out alone. In Canada and the US, call or text 988, 24/7. Anywhere else, findahelpline.com will connect you to a free, confidential line in your own country in under a minute. Reaching out isn’t the opposite of being strong. It’s the most human thing there is.