Ah this is interesting because I was going to write out a post the other day explaining how both me and my brother both developed this “high achiever” personality as a makeshift key card to enter society (we moved from Poland to England at 12 and so we were thrust rapidly into a different culture).
The interesting thing is that we both saw the pointlessness of slaving away in a career and so we chose ‘alternate pursuits’ instead such as parkour for example. What we did not realise is that we simply took those same values (which we thought we had escaped) inherent in the peasant mentality and applied them to these new pursuits, there they would remain unseen and cause harm in disguise.
I was going to write this exactly that these ‘counter culture’ values can end up working in the same way as spiritual values in that they are very slimy to get hold of. They appear to offer an escape from the grind and yet it is all the same game under a different guise. Which does make it that much harder to expose. And this has been the case exactly with me, that it was so obvious for me to release those values as they applied to working a career etc and yet those same values would leave me restless unless I was constantly progressing in my “alternate endeavours”. The hierarchy, the power, the recognition, the belonging etc it was all there but hidden.