Everything's going exactly as expected

Look what you started, is this what you wanted?

Doesn’t matter if you’re not a football fan, you should take a look at this:

“It is not acceptable for me. I don’t know why this is happening to me. I don’t get it. I think if this was somewhere else, every club would protect its player.

How I see it now is like you throw Mo under the bus because he is the problem in the team now. But I don’t think I am the problem. I have done so much for this club.

The respect, I want to get it. I don’t have to go every day fighting for my position because I earned it. I am not bigger than anyone but I earned my position. It’s football. It is what it is.

There’s no relationship between me and the manger. It was very good relationship and now all of a sudden there is no relationship.”

Mo Salah is undeniably The Guy at Liverpool, the English champions, and this is him exploding to the press this week after being taken out of the team. Full scorched Earth.

Cue huge media reaction and infinite takes on what could have possibly happened. I’ll save you some time, because this isn’t weird at all. It’s the dominant personality structure of a generation. Sort of.

Take a group of people who achieved remarkable individual success in their career/life and you will find within them a very well-represented segment of highly individualistic people. Not only focused on their individual outcomes to an extreme degree, but also believing in their potential to achieve those outcomes to an extreme degree.

When you’re young this reads as delusional confidence, because it sort of is. But it can be a necessary part of the deal to motivate the actions to get there. And crucially, the inherent achievement of being the best is kinda sweet, but identity tends to get swept up into a desire of this being externally validated. You can’t ‘achieve greatness’ on an island, people need to see it.

This is the personality type of a Mo Salah, or a Cristiano Ronaldo. Play a team sport, but care a lot about being the best individual. To a pathological degree, some might say.

Most people would call this a strength, and I would agree. Cristiano Ronaldo doesn’t become Cristiano Ronaldo without wanting to be Cristiano Ronaldo. The desire forces the insane discipline that creates the reality. And hey, there is a certain charm to the egotist who you know, he knows, he’s so, fucking gifted.

However, the thing that necessarily comes with that drive to being thought of as the greatest is that any threat is met with violence. Every single time without fail. If you have a friend who things they’re going to be the next best rapper, and you try to give them some honest feedback, they might well make every effort possible to prove you wrong (and get better), but you are also going to fall out along the way. Scorched Earth.

So here’s what’s not going on with Salah:

Liverpool and Salah’s bad form has raised tension in the camp. People in the club are intentionally making him a scapegoat. He just wants to be heard and loved, but the club are deciding to disrespect him.

Here’s what is going on:

Mo Salah places huge value on being perceived as the best player in the country. His performances this year don’t align with that. Him being taken out of the team is broadcasting to the nation that his own coach doesn’t think he’s the best anymore. His identity is under severe threat for the first time, and he’s going to get violent to prevent that from happening.

Check the clever narrative flip he’s built. He’s not out of the team because he’s not the best player. He’s out of the team because someone is out to get him. He’s just not allowed to show us how good he is.

(football fans will also note that this is non-coincidentally identical to how ridiculously Ronaldo behaved when he fell out of a starting team for the first time a couple years ago).

But here’s the thing to understand: this isn’t just an act of emotion to temporarily deal with identity in flux, this is a classic strategic play to keep identity in check long-term. He may say he wants things to be fixed and hates this situation, yet he has done the exact thing that makes it totally unsalvageable and essentially guarantees his role as Liverpool hero is over. Why?

Because in the story of being star player who fell into an explosive feud and was forced out of the club, he still gets to be called the star player. Whereas if he compromises and accepts he’s not playing well, his identity as The Guy is over. He’s One of The Guys. That is hell to someone who strives for greatness. He would pick never playing football again over that.

This is hopefully where you’re realising this post is not about football. This is about how identity relates to the reality you choose to live in.

Expectations make the world go round, and determine your perceived reality. Plenty of ways of talking about this in the behavioural sciences:

Placebo effects produce measurable physiological changes on top of subjective reports. The Pygmalion effect demonstrated that teachers’ expectations about students influenced actual student performance. Confirmation bias shows that expectations literally shape what people perceive. Self-fulfilling prophecies in economics, such as bank runs, show how collective expectations can create the very outcomes people anticipate.

Awesome, but it would be incorrect to stop at this point and go ‘wow expectations really do matter to what you think is happening’.

Expectations are closer to time travel. You see what you think the world will look like, and you travel back to the present to act in the way you’ll need to act to create that future.

But to understand that psychologically you need to then ask: where has the expectation come from, and why?

When you think to yourself, ‘damn my boss is gonna be hard on me in my annual review’, what’s built that expectation and where did it start? Why does it bother you so much? Why is it attracting all of your attention?

Chances are you like to think of yourself as being great at something: your job, your hobby, your style, your coolness, your attractiveness, your taste, your intelligence. It’s become very tied to your self-esteem. So it must be guarded with your psychological life.

Well how does one then react to a world of competing individuals where your ability to be seen as The Guy is constantly under threat of evaluation?

Well you do the efficient thing. You create the circumstance in which you can’t be evaluated fairly. And to make that even more cognitively efficient, and hide the trick from yourself, you dress it up as a justified expectation that the world isn’t going to treat you fairly. And so you inevitably get these shitty experiences that take up all your narrative, and forgive you of the responsibility of advancing your life.

I know I say this all the time, but coping with freedom is the hardest psychological task you’ll ever get offered. Almost everyone fails.

You want to think you’re a talented employee. Your boss is a bit of a stickler. You have the option to level up your t-crossing and i-dotting, but you also have the option to miss one every now and then. Stickling continues, and suddenly the reason you’re not being hailed as brilliant is someone else.

Modern therapy techniques will (sort of correctly) observe that your neurotic bias towards negative expectations is increasing the likelihood of you sticking in your cycles of negative experience.

But they will fail to tell you is that this is all by design, by you.

If you take anything from this blog this year, let it be this: you actually do want these shitty outcomes you claim not to want because that is safer for your identity. Because that way you do not have to face reality and change.

Everyone calls it tragic when Oedipus meets his fateful end, but they always forget:

When Laius and Jocasta were told that Oedipus would eventually destroy them, they pinned his ankles and abandoned him in the woods, ensuring that he’d someday have cause to do it

Now this is where you say ‘ok yes, don’t overdo a basic point, you’re saying everyone’s a bit like Mo Salah, we should check our ego’.

And this is where I say no, I’m saying it’s probably far worse than that.

Yes, Salah has unconsciously created the situation which allows him to keep his ego intact, even if it does mean the end of his Liverpool career. But at least he’s used it as a last resort.

Him and Ronaldo have the gene of expecting greatness for themselves, so they created the greatness they expected. Go find clips of people talking about what Ronaldo was like as a teenager and how he obsessively dedicated his waking life to perfection. Do you think you’re going to be great? Do you act in any way like he did?

Both players tested their greatness in measurable ways every week for 10-20 years. Eventually, maybe the greatness does run out, but the identity doesn’t. So, emergency measure, blow the whole thing up to cover your tracks.

But this is the 0.01% of performance.

What you are in much worse danger of is letting the emergency measure become your primary tactic. Never get to show you good you are because you’ve crafted a world that will not allow you to.

Bosses that don’t value you. An economic system that doesn’t give you the time. A thousand mini tasks that need to be completed first.

There is nothing wrong about wanting to be great. It is a blessing. But you must at least offer the world the opportunity to benefit from you realising it. Most people give up. You will be tempted to do the same.

Thankfully you haven’t yet.

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