Why Capable People Feel Lost Despite Success – And What Modern Society Gets Wrong About Identity
- 3 days ago
- 7 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
Sarah C. Aderibigbe is the founder and CEO of Motherwell Spring, a global platform focused on female identity, healing, and leadership. She is the author of The Soaring Single and Dine Like You Belong, and writes on internal coherence, purpose-led leadership, and the inner foundations of sustainable influence.
Many people describe feeling lost despite success, directionless even while doing everything right. This article explains why identity displacement is increasing in modern society, how the loss of identity formation affects education, leadership, and wellbeing, and why this decade is exposing a deeper structural failure beneath many current crises.
What is identity displacement and why is it increasing?
Why do so many capable people feel lost even though they are doing everything they were told would work?
They studied. They worked hard. They stayed informed. They made sensible choices. And yet the same quiet question keeps returning, “Why doesn’t any of this feel solid?”
This is not confusion. It is not weakness. And it is not a personal failure. It is the defining failure of this decade, one that education systems, labour markets, and leadership pipelines are already reacting to without fully understanding.
We are living through the Displacement Decade.
This is the era where people are given choice faster than identity, opportunity faster than formation, and visibility faster than direction, and then blamed when they struggle to carry the weight.
People today are more educated, more connected, and more exposed than any generation in history. Yet many feel internally unsettled, capable but unsure, busy but unanchored, visible but not formed.
Labels arrive early, potential, talent, ahead, behind, successful, often long before anyone helps answer the more important question beneath them, "What kind of person are you developing into? What is your life actually forming in you?"
Many describe this experience as an identity crisis in modern society, or as feeling directionless despite success. What often gets missed is that these are not isolated struggles, but symptoms of a deeper structural issue.
Why the problem keeps being misdiagnosed
This decade’s crisis is usually framed as:
a confidence problem
a motivation issue
a mental health emergency
Those explanations treat symptoms in isolation.
The deeper condition linking disengagement, burnout, imposter syndrome, leadership fragility, and rising NEET statistics is identity displacement. Identity displacement occurs when people are required to choose, perform, and progress before they have been helped to form a stable internal centre. They are compared before they are anchored. They are accelerated before they are ordered. They are exposed before they are ready.
This is not abstract theory. It is visible in the data.
In the UK, almost one in eight young people aged 16 to 24 are not in education, employment, or training, a statistic published by the UK Office for National Statistics and echoed across OECD countries. This reflects not only economic pressure, but a deeper breakdown in direction and formation.
Internally, the same fracture shows up another way. Research consistently shows that a majority of women and over a third of men report persistent imposter feelings despite objective competence, pointing not to a lack of ability, but to instability in how value and identity are formed.
The systemic pressure few name clearly
The quiet culprit is not individuals. It is not parents. It is not young people. It is systems designed to optimise speed without forming stability.
Education systems that accelerate assessment faster than identity. Platforms that reward visibility without grounding. Labour markets that demand early certainty without early formation.
None of these systems is malicious. But together, they create a civilisation that moves fast and forms late.
What this looked like in real life
This pattern is not unique to one country or one community. It appears that wherever people are accelerated faster than they are formed. Growing up in a council estate in South London, in Brixton, it was impossible not to notice the same quiet divergence happening again and again.
Bright boys who were sharp, quick-witted, and alert, but never helped to see themselves as anything beyond survival. Girls who were capable, responsible, and perceptive, but burdened early with roles that taught them to cope, not to form. By their teens, many were already moving fast. Making decisions early. Carrying adult weight too soon. Being trusted with responsibility, but never given language for identity.
Some were labelled “trouble.” Some were labelled “strong.” Some were labelled “wasted potential.” But underneath the labels was the same absence. No one had slowed the process down long enough to help them answer the most important question, "What am I actually building my life from?"
They were accelerated into choices without being formed for direction. They were given responsibility without a stable sense of self. They were expected to perform without ever being anchored.
Years later, the outcomes looked different on the surface, some struggled openly, others appeared outwardly successful, but the instability underneath was often the same.
Motion without coherence. Capability without clarity. Responsibility without roots. That was not a failure of talent. It was a failure of formation.
The locations change. The accents change. The systems differ. But the pattern remains the same.
The valuation-identity law
Beneath identity displacement sits a governing principle: Every identity is organised around a valuation. What is not internally valued cannot be lived with strength.
This is the Valuation-Identity Law.
When valuation is unclear, identity fragments. When valuation is externalised, identity becomes performative. When valuation is delayed, identity remains provisional.
This is why:
leadership collapses into performance
ambition turns into anxiety
freedom turns into drift
Identity is not the reward at the end of success. It is the root that determines what success can hold. Roots do not grow quickly. They grow in sequence.
The formation ladder, a framework for identity formation
Identity formation follows an order. When the order is disrupted, displacement follows.
Valuation to Identity to Responsibility to Direction. This framework, the Formation Ladder, explains why many interventions aimed at improving confidence, productivity, or engagement underperform when identity formation is missing.
Five questions that restore stability
Each rung of the ladder carries a governing question. These questions are not motivational prompts. They are structural.
Before asking, “What can you do?” the question must be: What is important enough that you would keep doing it, even when it costs you something?
Before increasing exposure, comparison, or leadership pressure, the question must be: Who is this person becoming in private, before anyone is watching or judging them?
Before multiplying choices, the question must be: Why does this choice matter for the life this person wants to build?
Before assigning responsibility, systems must ask: Is this responsibility helping the person grow, or asking them to carry something too heavy, too soon?
Before teaching people how to manage the world, the final question must be: When things are hard or uncertain, what happens inside this person, and who is in charge?
Together, these questions form a formation spine that can be applied in education, leadership development, and long-term workforce design.
Why this matters at a societal level
A society that accelerates people without forming them will always mistake motion for progress. We did not raise a confused generation. We accelerated a generation we never formed.
Modern systems increasingly ask people to decide their future while quietly removing the conditions required to know who they are.
The results are visible:
rising disengagement
burnout despite opportunity
leadership pipelines that look full but remain fragile
These are not personal shortcomings. They are design failures.
Just as roads carry traffic and schools carry knowledge, identity carries responsibility. When identity is weak, everything built on top strains.
What this decade is actually for
This is not a lost decade. It is a reordering decade. Borrowed identities are collapsing because they cannot hold the complexity now being asked of people.
That collapse feels like uncertainty. But it is not regression. It is preparation. When valuation is restored, identity stabilises. When identity stabilises, responsibility can be carried. When responsibility is carried well, direction emerges.
What feels like being lost today may later be recognised as: The necessary formation phase before a generation, and the systems that govern it, can carry what comes next.
This framework is not meant to be admired. It is meant to be used. Name it where you are. In classrooms. In leadership rooms. In policy conversations. In homes. In the way people are formed before they are assessed, accelerated, or exposed.
If this language gives clarity to something you have felt but could not articulate, repeat it. Teach it. Build with it. Let it travel without permission.
Because ideas that restore formation do not spread by promotion. They spread by recognition. This identity work is the most crucial work required of this generation, and it will define the next.
Read more from Sarah C. Aderibigbe
Sarah C. Aderibigbe, Founder & CEO, Motherwell Spring Global
Sarah Aderibigbe is an author, certified coach, and the founder and CEO of Motherwell Spring, a global platform focused on female identity, healing, and leadership. Raised in London, U.K., her work is shaped by a personal journey from inner fragmentation to internal coherence and clarity. Through both lived experience and professional training, Sarah explores how unresolved inner division quietly limits leadership, decision-making, and long-term influence. She is the author of The Soaring Single and Dine Like You Belong. Her writing invites women to move beyond performance and lead from a place of wholeness and inner authority.
Sources & Data References:
Below are sources that substantiate the specific statistics and claims used in the article:
UK NEET statistics (16-24 year olds):
UK Office for National Statistics (ONS): Young people not in education, employment or training (NEET), UK.
OECD: Comparative data on NEET rates across developed countries.
Imposter phenomenon/imposter syndrome (women & men):
KPMG (2020): The Confidence GapReports that 75% of female executives have experienced imposter syndrome during their careers.
International Journal of Behavioral Science (Clance & Imes; later meta-analyses): Found imposter phenomenon prevalent across genders, with women reporting higher rates and significant prevalence among men.
Asana / Harvard Business Review: Coverage on imposter syndrome in the workplace (men and women).
Education, acceleration, and disengagement (systemic context):
World Economic Forum: Future of jobs and skills mismatch.
