Am I Pretentious, or Just Escaping My Insecurity - being below average?

I had been meaning to write this blog for a long time, but procrastinated, similar to how Oscar bottled up the championship (I know nothing about procrastination, but wanted to write it, PS a tifosi here).

Life has been not living for a while now, giving reality checks or maybe I'm getting mature enough to recognize my faults (yup I'm narcissist), lately the realization has been I'm a very pretentious guy, and no I'm not demeaning someone on their choices, but yeah always criticizing, being pretentious has ruined my mental model tbh, lately have started to feel like am I doing everything just to pretend to the world,

I have always been high aspirational and with some elitism, yeah I'm not a common joe, “I'm different from you” attitude.

Well, there is one friend, who teases my mind that I'm precipitous, as he knows me for over a decade now, and I have high aspiration and don't want to settle for average, like I don't want to work for corporate as I don't align myself with that life, but a startup he thinks I like startup because it's fancy, might be true.

Well his thinking model and mine are 180 degrees apart, more on it in the next post, whereas my therapist thinks it's okay to have aspirations.

Okay, hold on tight, let me explain I am a very average guy, be it career or academics, yeah let's leave aside my social life for a moment (it's non-existent, I rarely talk to anyone until it’s my mood to talk to them).

Every girl whom I ever liked has been leagues ahead of me (well I guess its a common issue with all of us), and by league here I mean not in looks, but intellect, my first crush is now an IIT gold medalist and in a quant firm, another a top VC, ex is CA rank holder.

Whenever I take interest in something be it F1 (first in my group), comedians, or even cricket, I always choose the side who has high value associated to them or have a cult following, yeah I'm referring to Ferrari, in comedians not liking the mainstream, Bassi, Zakir and all, for cricket watching Test cricket and that too not India, discussing the nuances of cricket, and I lose interest in it as soon as it becomes mass.

I don’t enjoy F1 anymore, comedians bore and I can't even remember when I followed a full cricket match, and recently I have been getting into golf (another niche market now), yeah because I think I'm pretentious.

During school days, I was enrolled in a coaching institute, and I used to read the package/theory on the school bus, in the notion of yeah, I am saving my time, and pretending the same, not attending school, saying no to outings and stuff. But the result, yeah I learned a few things, understood the syllabus better yet I even failed to score top 20%ile in first attempt (yeah I took a gap year), and scored just par 76% in boards. You may argue, I might be a weak student, yeah I might be but the real issue was that I was pretending to study, proving others wrong, yeah I don't waste my time on all this shit, I am career oriented.

Later in the gap year, thanks to covid I toned down my pretentious nature, as most of the time I was home and had cut ties with most of the folks, so no one to prove to. Now, comes the college stage, a less pretentious one than school, yeah part of the reason was as I was in tier-1, almost everyone was like that, but yeah back to story.

Did some part-time work for last 2 years of college, made a good enough resume (even cracking a big tech firm as product intern) and managed my grades as well (not the best, but more than what I expected in first year), but most of the pretentious nature came during placement season, yeah I’ll not sit for this firm, this is below my level, I'm better than this, and time passed by and I couldn’t clear OA for any of the firms (no I'm not unemployed now) but yeah being pretentious, I'm better than you all I’ll get an off-campus placement, and a much better package.

Reality? A sub-par average package at a pre-PMF firm, but yeah at least it’s within my area of interest. So not a complete loss.

Here comes the biggest part, I got into a relationship earlier this year (now we are separated), and I was throwing grand gestures (which no one in my friend circle expected from me), and here I am telling everyone story of how I showed up that gesture (only the surface level details), and gauging their reaction on it. Even in one of my friend's meetings with her, I asked my friend to tell her what his reaction was when I told him about one of my gestures. Which was completely wrong on my part, and I even admitted it to her.

Even on LinkedIn I keep shitposting about what I did, what I learned, calling myself a failure, rage-baiting others just to put my thoughts out forward, just to stay relevant, and keep writing about product management this that, this moment taught me this, all that LinkedIn crap.

I have till now considered everything I have done as badge of achievement, across fields, and want people to know that I have done all this, but the core result of any of the activity has been sub-par, things that I might have achieved without wearing those badges, and maybe more if I had kept my head down and worked on the main job.

Maybe I have allowed my friends' affirmation to get into my head very seriously or there is something definitely wrong with me.

You could argue that I do all this to hide my insecurities, and use it as a cover-up, ‘man I’m too high class for anyone to understand me, I’m always right, people catch up to it later.’ I’m a crybaby , no one ever had a crush on me / I’m not good at anything / what was the point of doing so many things in college if I had to have an average job package.

But deep down the reason is I never paid full attention to doing my work with quality, but rather was busy pretending yeah I’m better than you. Maybe I need to change my friend circle to people who are better than me, maybe I should be around folks whom I aspire to be, but yeah will fail in that as well, as I don’t know how to make and maintain friends. Maybe I have allowed my friends' affirmation to get into my head very seriously or there is something definitely wrong with me.

Even writing this blog and posting can be pretentious, in a way “see I'm admitting I'm pretentious.”

I admit all the above history I have been pretentious, but how to get out of it, it’s messing up my mental model, gotta get out of this trap