The Unfinishable Self

Striving culture · Academia · Identity

On achievement anxiety, the women who carry it, and a system that was never designed to let them rest.

April 2026 10 min read

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that does not show up on a to-do list and it is not the tiredness of having done too much, although there is plenty of that, too. Instead, today I'm discussing the tiredness of never being quite sure that you have done enough...of finishing one thing and then feeling, almost immediately, the weight of something (or everything) not yet finished; it feels as though it is a bursting file folder. For high-achievers, it can feel as though there should be some sense of succeeding, but instead you experience a brief pause before the next set of expectations materializes, seemingly from nowhere, to take the place of the ones you just met, rather than any sense of relief.

I've heard this described and have labeled it in many ways: anxiety, imposter syndrome, perfectionism— or even as a failure of self-belief that more therapy, more coaching, more journaling might eventually resolve. Yet, what we rarely discuss or acknowledge, yet what I want to call it here, is a rational response to an irrational system. I find this to be a throwback to, or perhaps a modern version of, Erich Fromm's Sane Society - in effect, in such an insane society, only those who claim to feel sane are likely those who are, to use his terms, insane.

I am a sociologist who studies striving culture, and for the past several years I have been talking to high-achieving women (many of them in academia, many of them in other demanding professional fields) about what achievement actually feels like from the inside. What I have found is not what the self-help literature would predict, or it may be better to say desire (since they need people who need to feel like they mist be fixed, perpetually). Instead, these women do not fully lack confidence or self-belief; they are women who are reading their situation accurately and, to a certain extent, are instead being gaslighted by the striving culture.

* * *

In my research, I kept encountering a particular pattern. Women would describe working hard, achieving things, being recognized, yet go on to express not really a sense of satisfaction, but instead a kind of recalibration. The goalposts keep moving, even from an internal perspective. One participant, a tenured professor I'll call Katie, put it simply: "I don't know what enough looks like. I don't think I ever have."

At first this sounds like a psychological problem that could be classified as an 'internal calibration error' and something to work on in therapy. There can be real suffering in it and I want to do the opposite of dismissing that. But when you hear the same thing, in different words, from dozens of women across different institutions, fields, and life stages—especially as a sociologist—intuition immediately shifts the focus away from the pattern as starting from inside the women to a focus on how it originates from the structure they are navigating.

Women in the study described achievement not as a destination but as a moving target. However, it can feel as though the target was shifting in response to their own progress—in other words, it is helpful for us to take into consideration how we pinpoint the direction of pressures in our own lives (e.g., internally, externally, or both [internalization]). While setting goals can be extremely necessary and is helpful as a form of motivation to start, reaching a milestone did not produce a sense of arrival; it produced a revised benchmark. Several participants described this feeling as close to "addicted to striving"—oftentimes because it felt compulsive to need, versus even want, more, and beyond this, stopping felt more uncertain (and potentially detrimental) than continuing for....the need to continue.

The structure, it turns out, is working exactly as designed. Academic institutions, and many professional cultures more broadly, are built on systems of evaluation that are deliberately open-ended. There is always another publication, another grant, another metric by which you might be found wanting. This is not a bug. It is a part of the "sane" society. A workforce that is always slightly anxious about its adequacy is a workforce that keeps producing.

The exhaustion is not a personal failing. It is the feeling of a system pressing on a person—and the person, correctly, feeling the weight.

What makes this particularly acute for women, and especially for women of color navigating predominantly white institutions, is that the standards are not applied evenly. Research consistently shows that women's work is evaluated more critically, that they are given less benefit of the doubt, that they must produce more to be seen as equivalent. This means that women are not being paranoid or "over the top"—no. This anxiety about adequacy is highly intellectual and intuitive pattern recognition of the bar consistently being raised, moving in multiple directions, and not always visible.

* * *

This is where the self-help industry steps in, and where I think it does some of its most complicated work because there is a ready-made vocabulary for what these women are experiencing and it is almost entirely individualized: you need better boundaries. You need to learn to say no. You need to work on your relationship with perfectionism. You need, in the language of contemporary wellness, to unlearn your conditioning—which is perpetually being fed back to you in commodified and institutionalized packaging.

Of course, some components are useful to a certain extent, as supportive actors—therapy, coaching, developing a clearer sense of your own values, separate from institutional demands, matters. I believe this—it is part of why I do the work I do.

Yet, there is something troubling about a cultural conversation that takes a structural problem and interprets it entirely as individual psychology. When we tell women that their achievement anxiety is a mindset issue, we are doing two things simultaneously: we are offering them something real (tools for coping, frameworks for reflection) and we are quietly exonerating the system that produced the anxiety in the first place.

Striving culture does not exist because women have complicated relationships with success. It exists because institutions have learned to extract enormous amounts of labor by keeping the definition of success permanently out of reach. The anxiety fuels the system.

When we route a structural problem entirely through individual psychology, we offer people tools for coping while quietly exonerating the system that made coping necessary.

* * *

So what do we do with this? I want to be careful here not to replace one unhelpful framework with another. Knowing that your anxiety is structurally produced does not make it go away. Structural critique, on its own, is cold comfort at two in the morning when you are lying awake running through everything you haven't finished.

I do think naming it accurately helps to spark change; not because naming things is magic (it isn't, and can be pigeonholing), but rather the story you tell about your exhaustion shapes what you think is possible. If the exhaustion is a personal failing, the solution is personal transformation. If it is a structural condition, the solutions look different: they involve other people, collective negotiation, a refusal to accept the terms you have been handed as natural or inevitable.

Several women in my research described a moment—sometimes gradual, sometimes sudden—of what I can only call seeing the game. Not opting out of it, necessarily. But recognizing it as a game, with rules that were made and could, at least in theory, be unmade. One participant described it as "realizing that the finish line wasn't real. It was never real. And once I saw that, I stopped running toward it and started asking where I actually wanted to go."

That question, "Where do I actually want to go, by my own measure, in a life that is genuinely mine?" is harder than it sounds. It requires disentangling what you want from what you have been rewarded for wanting. It requires tolerating the discomfort of not having a clear external benchmark. It requires, in the deepest sense, authoring something rather than performing it.

That is not a ten-step process and it will consistently remain an ongoing, nonlinear, sometimes frustrating practice.

Which is to say: it is a draft. Not a rough version of the finished thing. The thing itself, alive and still being written. The unfinishable self is not the problem—instead, the problem is the falsehood that you should be 'finished'.