“Swift Running” Students: Anxiety and Achilles

It may be October, but let us look ahead, for a moment, to graduation season. New clothes, purgatorial photo sessions, countless handshakes, and hundreds of cards condemned to eternally sit in a desk drawer, all with the same sentiment written on them: “You’ll make us proud!” “Do great things!” “You’ll change the world!” 

All these messages are meant to be encouraging. While the intention is noble, I question the means by which this encouragement is conveyed. 

More specifically, why does our society find it necessary to declare that all of its young people will, or must, change the world?

As it happens, this tradition of sending children into their adult lives with high expectations is nothing new. Even the great Achilles of Homer’s Iliad was raised under the staggering weight of well-meant expectations. In book 11, we learn that, before sending his son off to war, Achilles’ father told him: “Now always be the best, my boy, the bravest, / and hold your head up high above the others.” A comment that aligns quite well with those written on graduation cards, eh? 

But the same message of world-changing achievement meant to uplift Achilles ended up destroying him.  A more accurate comment would have been, “Now always be the best, my boy, the bravest, / become a slave to achievement, alienate yourself in the pursuit of glory, and die in misery before you turn thirty.” Look past the dark exaggeration here and you’ll see a common truth. The graduation cards are just a symptom of a greater issue in society: achievement, success, and personal glory are casually treated as expectations.

With anxiety levels on the rise and various coping mechanisms—healthy or otherwise—employed by students and young professionals, many are simply trying to live under the burdens modern society has placed on them. Like it or not, we are all Achilles. We have been raised with the message that we must single-handedly change the world, and when we falter or have setbacks, this shakes the identity we have internalized. 

There’s a reason why they call him “the swift runner Achilles” instead of “the well-adjusted,” “the kind,” or even “the happy.” Swift running is his gift; it is the thing that sets him apart and promises him greatness. Any failure to maintain this status would require a fundamental change in who Achilles is. Read the Iliad; if Achilles decided one day to be something other than swift-footed, his entire fate would be directly reversed.

So, why did Achilles –  and, more to the point, why do you and I – keep at it? Why play a game that promises us the world and crushes us with reality? 

Because success feels good. Personal glory, no matter how small, feels good. Who doesn’t like to hold their head up high above the others? 

Yet we cannot deny that such height leaves us with a feeling of emptiness that no Homeric epithet can fill. It creates a way of life that will only demand more and more from us until we have nothing left to give but our raw selves. And for those like Achilles, that isn’t enough.

There comes a moment at the end of Homer’s poem when Achilles’ desire for honor results in terrible personal loss. He weeps, tears his hair, and even wishes for death when he realizes how petty he has become. He can do nothing to restore the loss, but he can do one thing to restore himself and correct his skewed values. In the final book of the Iliad, Achilles, secretly and without fuss, honors his enemy above himself. This is the solution Homer offers us, the secret to humility and the escape from ambition. Honoring another above himself counters Achilles’ culture and will not result in personal glory, but that is the point. 

Can we really be surprised to learn that the things we ought to be doing are the things that will never result in earthly praise? Achievement for the sake of self-advancement is a vicious cycle that will leave you desolate. Take a lesson from Achilles’ own life: become swift-footed to run toward what matters.

If you haven’t yet, I encourage you to read the Iliad. Read about a problematic hero who you can’t help but find yourself in, and watch him go from destructively proud to mercifully kind. Both an entertaining and relevant story, the Iliad teaches virtue through the example of vice. 

Homer sees the danger of mindless ambition and offers a solution still effective two thousand years later; effective indeed, because human nature is the same now as it was in the Bronze Age. Because we are all Achilles, but we don’t have to be.