The question came up in conversation the other day and got me thinking. It seems like a lot of highly successful people are depressed. We asked ourselves why that might be and here are our hypotheses. When we were talking about successful we were talking about the outliers kind of successful people, the CEOs of major banks, best selling authors, etc.
- Getting to where they are is stressful. Your work can become your life.
- If success means having influence, people are going to criticize you for decisions you make, especially if those decisions affect them.
- People tend to congregate with others who have similar interests and social statuses, but not many people get to be best selling authors, so it might be harder to find real friends.
- No one else is doing what they’re doing, their future is more uncertain and there’s more pressure on them to make the right choices
However, most extremely successful people seem pretty happy, and the group as a whole are probably a lot happier than those working 80 a week in an investment bank, so it makes me wonder, why did we get that impression in the first place. The suicide rate is highest among high stress professions like dentistry and law, if there was a quantifiable measure of depression that could be applied to those professions and if we grouped the highly “successful” people in a group and measured them, I suspect that they won’t be any more unhappy than the most stressful professions out there.
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