Fear and the Jonah Complex

In which we fear success and self-improvement

Jonah and the Whale by Dutch painter Pieter Lastman (1621)

Imagine that an opportunity wanders onto your path. Perhaps it’s a new job that sounds just right, perhaps it’s a chance to open your own business, perhaps you finished a novel and an agent/publisher has shown interest, perhaps your crush finally deemed you worthy of a glance.

Whatever it is, you know that - if it works out - it can improve your life and bring you closer to that ideal self you dream about.

Your heart starts doing odd jumps and your hands get clammy. You forget all words and your lungs fail in their job of finding sufficient oxygen, so your breathing becomes rapid and shallow.

Most of us are intimately familiar with the fear of failure. What if it doesn’t work out? What if you face rejection, again? I know, I know, failure is a necessary step to success, it’s something to learn from, etc. (There, I just summarized the multi-billion-dollar self-help industry for you in one sentence. You’re welcome.) Doesn’t lessen the sting, though.

But there’s another type of fear at play here and we rarely hear about it. The fear of success.

Psychologist Abraham Maslow (yes, the hierarchy of needs guy) called this fear the ‘Jonah complex’, after the biblical Jonah who thought he knew better than god and got to spend some time in a whale’s stomach as a result. In the psychology textbook Theories of Personality, we find the Jonah complex described as:

The Jonah complex, which is found in nearly everyone, represents a fear of success, a fear of being one’s best…

Sometimes, this is also called ‘success neurosis’ and - as that term implies - it seems to be more pronounced in people who score high on the neuroticism personality trait. (*waves*)

Why would we fear success? Maslow himself saw two reasons:

• The human body is not made for extended periods of ‘peak experience’. (I find this a very odd reason, but hey, given the overlap between mind and body, why not.)

• The wrongful attribution of arrogance. Suppose you succeed and do this amazing thing, will that cause others to see you as arrogant? (Here the self-help industry will tell you not to care about what anyone thinks. Very few people can actually pull that off.)

Since Maslow made these suggestions, other possible reasons for the Jonah complex have been proposed, such as worries about the work and responsibilities that come with success, worries about no longer fitting into what people see as ‘a normal life’ (an idea that never fails to make me shudder), and a good helping of impostor syndrome.

In short, the Jonah complex arises from the worry or fear about the (potential) costs of success. I don’t think Maslow would agree 100% with me here, but let’s call it my personal Jonah complex then.

Time to turn my gaze inward for a moment.

Fear of failure? Big, fat checkmark. It’s one of the bold red threads that runs through my life, all the way from crazy three-year-old me to today. (A funny observation here is that I - despite the fear of failure - was a daredevil as a kid when it came to physical stuff.)

Fear of success? Also, yes. In hindsight, I can see several opportunities that I did not pursue, not only because of the promise of rejection but also because of my mind spinning out various ‘what if it works out’ scenarios. What if I have to move country and start over (again)? What if it means leaving behind all semblance of financial security/stability? What if making it to the other side means I have to burn bridges? What if I have to turn other aspects of my life around? And so on.

Fearing both failure and success is like doing a backflip on a tightrope. Blindfolded. And drunk.

This is not an easy realization. It means that most of my (in)action is driven by fear. But worse, it implies that I have become complacent*. Have I rolled into a solitary path of least resistance? I don’t know. I’m afraid (ha!) of the answer.

Do you sometimes worry about actually being successful in that thing you (secretly?) aspire to?

---

* Not the same as the socially engineered complacency that keeps us docile and uninspired. We’ll tackle that another day, perhaps.

---

Thanks for stopping by. Always a pleasure to see you.

---