[Noos]

No, despair often comes anyways. Those high achievers simply don't just achieve; in the process, they often define what "average" means in something.

You see it in multiplayer videogames for example. The further, faster players often end up skewing the whole competitive curve, to where ranking players are a lot better on the whole compared to when the game started, but worse off by the metrics. A silver player now is easily equal to a gold player at launch.

You can spend all this effort on a skill treadmill spending more and more effort to remain the same, only to fall off of it. High achievers are far too efficient and things tend to optimize way too much over time to try and play the competitive game.

I think you can also see this in things like children's sports; the people who turn little league into portfolio activities end up raising the cost for everyone, who then abandons the sport.

This is something I am wrestling with a lot in my life, and I think a lot of competitive burnout happens due to this. I can try to be my best self, but the deep end of the pool is so deep that it gets harder to not seek shallower and shallower water till I get out or drown.