In the game of life, getting a passing grade seems like achievement enough to me

By now it’s a formula. Whether it’s the Great British Bake Off, Master Chef, The Voice of Wherever or I’m a Celebrity etc, those who get booted out deliver variations on the same statement: “Just being here was a great experience, I learned so much and I had so much fun.”

How many mean it?

Those who do are wise. They strike a blow against the perfectionistic demands we put on ourselves – never satisfied with a pass but always demanding a first.

When I was going to school 40 per cent was a pass in any exam, as is usually the case today too. We were all quite happy to achieve that magic number. Sixty per cent was honours and that was even better to achieve, but what we basically wanted, to ward off the ire of teachers, was 40 per cent.

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Somewhere along the line 40 per cent ceased to be good enough and today many third-level students would regard anything less than 70 per cent as an occasion for weeping, gnashing of teeth, and badgering the lecturer. Forty per cent would require lying down in a dark room for a long recovery.

I’m not saying they’re wrong. I am more concerned with the marks we give ourselves when assessing our performance in the game of life.

We have little control we have over large chunks of our own lives. So little that demanding consistent excellence is ridiculous

In that game it seems to me 40 per cent is, indeed, a wise mark to aim for. Much of life is random and unpredictable. The Buddha said a couple of millenniums ago that whatever you think is going to happen, something will be different.

Yes, as a statement that lacks originality and would never score a first. But it underlines how little control we have over large chunks of our own lives. So little that demanding consistent excellence is ridiculous.

Consider this: We have had, or are having, a pandemic, a war, disrupted supply lines, rampant inflation and a climate crisis that will change all our lives beyond recognition.

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And yet some of us go around feeling bad because we have not performed perfectly. Are we mad? In light of all this disruption, getting a pass in life seems like achievement enough to me. It lightens the load and maybe gives us space to ‘be ourselves.’

A really sad thing about all this, I think, is that when we hit that perfect achievement, that perfect promotion, our old enemy “impostor syndrome” might well appear out of the shadows. ‘If they knew what you are really like ...’ it whines at you and at millions of others.

Freud first wrote about this in a 1925 paper called “those wrecked by success”. Later he suggested that achievements that seem “too good to the true” can be accompanied by a sense of guilt. He himself felt this way when he fulfilled a long-standing wish to visit the Acropolis at Athens.

Psychoanalyst Dr Mary Lamia said in Psychology Today that “this accomplishment, he believed, was unconsciously perceived as disloyalty to his parents ...” because they could never have done this.

Erik Erikson, who published influential work in the 1950s and 1960s on the psychological and social stages we pass through, suggested that the last of these stages can either be satisfaction at what you have accomplished or despair at what you have not.

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As the population of the western world ages more and more people are falling into one or other of these categories, maybe those who regard 40 per cent as a pass in life are more likely to experience satisfaction than those who demanded an unrealistic 90 per cent. The latter is left glumly contemplating its failure to achieve.

If you are in that latter segment, remember there’s nothing to say you can’t give yourself 40 per cent now and declare that to be enough.

Then maybe you too will be able to declare that “just being here was a great experience, I learned so much and I had so much fun, at least 40 per cent of the time”.

– Padraig O’Morain (Instagram, Twitter: @padraigomorain) is accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His books include Kindfulness – a guide to self-compassion; his daily mindfulness reminder is available free by email