How ‘Floating Duck Syndrome’ Explains Why We Work Ourselves to Death
And why burnout is now a global epidemic
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There are roughly two dozen ducks in the pond next to my house.
Last year, there were only two, but I guess news travels fast in the duck world, and this year, they decided this was the perfect place for them to form a small duck community.
I’m not complaining, though. Every time I leave my house and pass the pond, I like to stop for a couple of minutes to observe them gliding smoothly across the greenish-blue water and imagine how nice it (probably) is to be one. On the outside, ducks are a picture of tranquillity and poise.
But beneath the surface, the duck’s feet paddle, often furiously, to stay afloat. We just don’t see it. Some species can even travel at speeds of up to 20 miles (32 kilometres) per hour in short bursts. (The fastest human sprinting speed is 27.8 miles per hour, in case you were wondering.)
This contrast of apparent ease and concealed effort also forms the basis of a psychological phenomenon dubbed ‘floating duck syndrome.’ First coined at Stanford University, it described students’ tendency to mask their struggles to cope in a highly competitive environment behind a veneer of effortless proficiency and composure. But I think it can also resonate more broadly as a metaphor for the dynamics inherent in modern society.
On the one hand, we’re pressured to project an image of success, prosperity, and ease. And many people, seemingly, do.
But, on the other, there’s much more hidden beneath their outward appearance than we probably realise.
Somewhere along the way, and certainly since the advent of the internet and social media, the expectations of how our lives ‘should’ be have gone through the roof.
Go to university and get a degree — or two. Land a high-paying job. Get married. Buy your first home. Make it Instagram-worthy. Own the latest gadgets. Maintain a balanced diet, regular exercise schedule and active social life. Go on holiday twice a year. If you happen to be a woman, there’s then the bonus pressure to embody the modern superwoman, especially if you have children — have a ten-step skincare routine, maintain the ideal body type but also effortlessly juggle career demands with domestic labour while ensuring everyone’s emotional needs are met at all times.
What? So many people do all of this without breaking much of a sweat.
Or so it appears from scrolling through social media, glossy magazines’ lifestyle columns or the ever-more popular ‘self-made’ millionaire and billionaire lists. Sure, the standards for achievement in nearly every single area of life — career, health, social life, parenting, etc. — can seem stratospheric, but, hey — it’s actually all within your grasp, society then whispers in our ear.
We all have the same 24 hours in a day. Anyone can go from rags to riches. Anyone can live the dream. So what’s stopping you?
But just as a duck’s serene gliding hides the vigorous paddling beneath, the seemingly perfect reels of people’s lives often mask the relentless effort required to keep them up and the many struggles they entail.
Influencer culture, in particular, is shrouded in a cloud of illusions. We might be familiar with the five-star hotels they frequent and private jet flights they take, but not the stories of having to go into crippling debt, sharing cramped apartments or even resorting to having… ‘sugar daddies’, as a recent piece in The Times suggests is becoming increasingly common. Or that perhaps they never even set foot in a private jet, just a ‘studio’ rented to fake a high-flying lifestyle. (Oh, yes, that’s a thing.)
Still, according to Brooke Erin Duffy, a professor at Cornell University who studies the rise of the creator economy, most top influencers come from existing economic and social privilege. This is yet another hidden reality, and not just when it comes to influencers: the systemic advantages that make picture-perfect, successful lives achievable. (At least, sort of.)
As UC Berkeley professor Robert Reich put it, rags to riches stories are, more often than not, ‘riches-to-even-more-riches stories.’ The illusion of well-deserved or ‘self-made’ success usually masks inherited wealth, ‘modest’ loans from the Bank of Mum and Dad, family connections, tax loopholes, government subsidies, and sometimes even exploitation.
We might all have 24 hours in a day, but that looks very different if someone else handles your cooking and cleaning and child-rearing and if you don’t have to worry about whether you’ll have a roof over your head next month.
The life we’re told to aspire to is usually just a carefully crafted and highly unachievable illusion.
And chasing it isn’t doing us any favours.
As a young-ish Millennial, born on the cusp of the Millennial and Gen Z cohorts, I can’t help but notice that most of my peers feel like they’re failing at life and that ticking off the boxes on society’s milestones list — which our parents and grandparents did at a much younger age than us — has become near-impossible to achieve.
A recent survey in the UK revealed that ‘milestone anxiety’ — a term coined to describe the pressure to reach certain traditional life milestones, like finding a partner, having children, buying a house, climbing the career ladder, and so on — is indeed on the rise among many young people, with 77% of Millennials and 83% of Gen Z struggling with feeling like they’ve fallen behind.
But it’s not just younger generations that find it difficult to live up to society’s expectations. Take parents, for instance. Another recent survey found that the majority (61%) of mothers and nearly half of fathers (42%) believe they don’t meet the expectations of a ‘good parent.’
However, the problem is that we often don’t realise just how common these feelings of ‘failing at life’ are nowadays. We take a quick glance at other people and the filtered version of their lives that hides the struggle, anxiety, self-doubt, and overwork it took to get to where they are or the help they got along the way, and we feel like something must be wrong with us. We made all the wrong choices, didn’t work hard enough or didn’t have what it takes to succeed. And so, the only way to even come close to catching up, to belong in this world, is by working ourselves to death.
But this then inevitably leads to burnout.
A recently published study done among 11,000 workers in eight countries — Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, Japan, the UK and the US — revealed that nearly half of them are currently grappling with burnout. Burnout has also been recognised as a modern epidemic by several health organisations, including the World Health Organisation. Meanwhile, chronic diseases — frequently linked to chronic stress and overwork — now make up seven out of ten deaths globally.
A recent study in Evolutionary Human Sciences investigated whether the floating duck syndrome and this disconnection between perception and reality in an ocean of societal pressures plays a role in this epidemic and confirmed that they likely do. Using a mathematical model to analyse how this social phenomenon affects social learning and decision-making, the researchers found that when people see others achieving success without apparent effort, they tend to underestimate the difficulty of tasks and overcommit themselves. This can then lead to overall lower success rates, higher stress and disappointment.
As one of the researchers involved in the study, Erol Akçay, pointed out:
These findings matter. Modern life constantly calls upon us to decide how to divide our time and energy between different domains of life, including school, work, family, and leisure. How we allocate our time and energy between these domains, how many different activities we pursue in each domain, and what the resulting rewards are, have profound effects on our mental and physical health.
When success is ever-so-visible, but failures or what makes it possible aren’t, it’s no wonder so many people are deceived into thinking that overcommitting is the only way to go. And even if we do struggle, we must hide it from public view, which not only adds weight to our burdens but can further isolate us from potential sources of support.
And this, in turn, keeps the illusion going.
If you take a peek beneath the surface of our society, you’ll find no shortage of illusions that ensure it keeps operating the way it does today. There’s the illusion of meritocracy. The illusion of self-sufficiency. The illusion of a ‘self-made’ billionaire.
But it becomes particularly cruel to insist that we can ‘make it’ on our own in a world that constantly seems to move the goalposts and demand more and more while the cost of basic life necessities, such as housing and food, only keeps rising. It doesn’t matter how furiously we paddle through the waters of our lives if the race was rigged all along, does it?
Social historian Harold Perkin once described the Victorian myth of the self-made millionaire as ‘one of the most powerful instruments of propaganda ever developed by any class to justify itself and seduce others to its own ideal’, which I find also applies to all these other capitalist illusions some people still hold dear and refuse to let go of today.
Unfortunately, the societal pressure to keep going and excel at everything with ease, driven by the belief that others are managing it all seamlessly, can be detrimental to our mental, emotional, and even physical health. In particular, considering the broader societal norm where vulnerability and asking for help are stigmatised and viewed as weaknesses.
No one wants to admit they’re struggling.
No, we all aspire to be self-sufficient islands.
Well, right now, many of us do need help. We also all need one another.
Burnout, chronic stress, and related issues shouldn’t be seen as unavoidable consequences of modern life. They’re the result of a highly individualistic culture that values relentless self-reliance and the pursuit of unrealistic ideals above all else — including the well-being of ourselves and others.
However, it can be replaced with a culture that values honesty, transparency, compassion, and collective care instead.
We just need to realise that’s a possibility worth working towards.
Ducks are quite social when paired off and while caring for the young. But even now, when the ducklings are all grown up, the ducks in the pond near me usually hang out in big groups and make a ruckus together, especially in the early hours of the morning.
Humans used to be highly social beings, living in tightly-knit communities, too. And it’s precisely this element of cooperation that separated us from other members of our family tree.
It’s a shame we seem to be going in the opposite direction today: isolating ourselves and prioritising individual achievement — or the illusion of achievement — over communal support.
We don’t have — and shouldn’t — keep this charade going, though.
I've given a lot of thought to doing an unfluencer series -- posing in my hallway, which we pulled all the old wallpaper off of but haven't had a chance to restore, as an example. I think it would be very relatable to a lot of people, but I assume nobody wants that much reality.
You always pick such compelling topics and flesh them out so clearly and poignantly. Thank you.