One plausible answer is that the very skills and sensibilities that allow people to climb these ladders also habituate them to doubting themselves constantly. Parents train the striving classes this way, and so do peers and teachers and our ambient culture, and being trained in this way trains us to train ourselves, to discipline our selves. Success in elite educational and professional milieus increasingly depends on an almost obsessive attunement to other people’s judgments, shifting norms, and invisible rules, so the habit of self-surveillance never switches off. Instead of arriving at a stable sense of having “made it,” these individuals internalize the idea that their status is always provisional, always subject to reassessment by peers who are just as anxious and competitive as they are. The result is a life lived under continuous internal audit