struggle with an achievement-centered view
struggle with an achievement-centered view
Blog Article
An Achievement-Centered View of Personal Value
One of the first things that emerges in conversations with athletes when we’re talking about what’s most important in their lives is their sense that their value as a human being is based on their wins, medals, or records. And this is precisely the root of one of the big crises of retirement. They worry: If I’m not winning anymore, what am I worth? What’s the point of my life? What makes me special?
As they explain this state of mind, athletes often tell stories of childhood coaches (and sometimes parents) who only praised them for their achievements and were hypercritical of them for every mistake. There was a conditional nature to the attention and care they were given growing up, sending the message that it is not who they are but what they do (and more specifically, the result of what they do in comparison to others) that is most important. Athletes internalize this message and adopt the notion that they are only worthy as people—and only worthy of love—when they win. Thus, they are stuck in the unstable and anxious predicament of having their personal worth rise and fall with the chaos of outcomes that are largely outside of their control.
When asked about other potential sources of personal value, like their thoughts, feelings, aspirations, perspectives, personality, creativity, character, courage, work ethic, way of being a friend, or just their unique and irreplaceable way of being themselves, many athletes say that those things were not recognized growing up, not considered interesting, or worse—they were silenced. “The focus was always on the results.” “We didn’t really have a voice.” “There was not a chance to express an opinion about anything or make our own choices.” “Nobody really knew me. Anything that was ‘me’ was pushed down.”
What mattered to coaches and often parents was performance: serving the goals and reputation of the team full-time, fulfilling expectations of glory, and getting results. The focus was on the destination, not the journey…and certainly not who was on that journey. Athletes were considered worthwhile in terms of their function on the team alone and continually under threat of being discarded if they did not fulfill that function. This was expressed in the popular coach’s mantra: “If you can’t get results, there are plenty of people waiting in line to take your place on the team.”
Treating Humans as “Mere Means to an End”
In discussions of ethics, philosophers might put it this way: These athletes were being treated as mere “means to an end.” That means they were treated merely as “instrumentally valuable,” rather than as “intrinsically valuable.” They were being used as mere tools to fulfill some other goal deemed more important than they were—more important than their own humanity.
This type of treatment is identified as a failure of morality in Immanuel Kant’s philosophy. For Kant, morality demands that we treat and respect human beings as entities of absolute worth or as “ends in themselves,” not merely as instruments for some further purpose. It is, thus, a moral imperative that you “[a]ct in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means” (Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals).
These athletes, in being treated as “mere means to an end,” were treated as things, objects, or performance machines, not as people who are precious in their own right, whose well-being matters for its own sake, and who have a right to their own autonomy (i.e., their own self-governance in their thinking, judgments, actions, and pursuits).