Why do Ivy League students self-sabotage?

It is a common thing among those who grow up being praised for their intelligence. If one comes to base their self-worth on their intelligence and believe it is a static quality they were born with, struggling and/or failing could demonstrate that perhaps they weren't as smart as people gave them credit for and thus decrease their inherent self-worth. They quit things if they don't immediately excel at them or just adopt the "slacker" role and put in minimal effort, brushing off their failures as merely the result of not really caring about whatever it was they were attempting. "Eh, I could have been good at [x], but it bored me" or whatever

Ordinary folk self sabotage as well, you don't have to be an over achieving ivy league student to be that way. No one likes failure and many people understand their societal worth is bound to their status/career and not to who they are as a person; hence the status anxiety and the (sometimes) self sabotaging behavior.

> Why shouldn’t they want to have opinions and goals and have needs that aren’t compatible with what they do for a living just like everyone else?

The article is about people who say they want these things, but act in a way that ensures they won’t get what they claim to want.

If they’re lying and don’t actually want the achievements they claim to want, that’s hard to tell from outside. Best we can do is take their word. But you are right that revealed preferences win in the end. You are what you do.

I think what’s described in this post is the issue for some high-achieving students (Ivy or not) when it comes to self-sabotage but there’s a few others:

My personal story involved two years of self-sabotage. However it wasn’t intentional, nor was I hiding from failure, I just didn’t know how to go about achieving my potential. School was trivial for me before college minus my freshman year of high school, in which my grades were still good, I just got assigned an inordinate amount of homework every night and was programmed to do all the assigned readings etc. By the end of high school, I figured out how to do the bare minimum necessary to succeed and get As. College…doesn’t really work that way. I worked the same way I did in high school and got anything from As to Cs based on my natural aptitude for the subject. When I did study for exams I wasn’t studying effectively. If I didn’t know how to solve a homework problem, I just skipped it and figured it didn’t matter in the wash.

That continued for me until I did work in a lab as a junior, met PhD students and postdocs, and realized I wanted to get a PhD myself because I found what they did fascinating. The last two years were very stressful for me since I had to improve my B+ GPA so I could get into a good program, but my PhD student friends showed how I should be approaching college and I managed to fix a lot of my bad habits. I remember early on expressing my doubts I’d be able to pull it off to one of the postdocs early and he said “I don’t get it, you’re a smart guy, why is your transcript fully of Bs and Cs?” The answer really was that I just didn’t know how poorly I was applying myself.

The other issue that afflicted me to a degree in my early years but afflicted many people I knew more significantly during my time as an undergrad at an Ivy was that they didn’t know what they wanted to do after. These people often had better grades than me and were studying something that they enjoyed but they weren’t thinking about their career after school. They didn’t do internships or extracurriculars that might help them figure out their interests. They spent their summers studying abroad, relaxing at home, etc. While there’s nothing wrong with those things in a vacuum, it meant that they left school with a good GPA (or not because they didn’t have a goal and thus didn’t see a need to apply themselves), a fairly empty resume, and no clue what they wanted to do with their lives. Up until this point was the tacit assumption that they were smart and went to a good school and they’d find a good job they liked at the end of the road. However, due to how they spent their college years, they had to spend a good chunk of their 20s figuring out what they wanted from their lives. During that period they worked uninspiring jobs they certainly didn’t need an Ivy League education to get and sometimes required going back for a masters to retool themselves once they found a passion.

These issues seemed quite universal. It didn’t matter what your legacy status or family background was, it was just not obvious how to make the most out of college until it was too late for many of us. This is probably equally a problem at less highly ranked schools, but given that Ivies tend to collect motivated people, our struggle to succeed is under more of a microscope.