Lexicon ·
burden of performance
noun phrase
- Stated meaning
- The expectation that a man keep performing, in confidence, competence and standing, to remain attractive to a partner.
- Operating meaning
- A contract with no completion clause, under which every payment is credited to the current period only.
- Origin
- Named on the men's blog The Rational Male in September 2014, in a post of that title. The phrase does not appear on the pickup newsgroup alt.seduction.fast.
The post that named it (opens in a new window), in September 2014, opened on a passage the same blog had printed a year earlier (opens in a new window) without the phrase. Its terms are absolute: “as a man you will always be evaluated on your performance (or the perception of it),” and “For Men, there is no true rest from performance.” The relief it offers is to stop experiencing the performance as one: “you must actually be your performance – it must be internalized.”
By 2021 a magazine essay on the men’s self-improvement market (opens in a new window) could gloss the phrase for outsiders. Its readers, the essay said, “must accept the ‘burden of performance,’” which meant “making themselves into attractive potential partners by performing, i.e., developing confidence, self-reliance, and real-world skills.” The list is a résumé, and the burden is that it is never filed.
Under load, the burden is a review with no end date. Past results earn no tenure, each period is assessed as if it were the first, and the doctrine names no point at which the reviewer is satisfied. Its relief is to internalize the review until it is no longer noticed, which passes the review by leaving it permanently in place. The reviewer is never consulted about any of this. The doctrine supplies the reviewer’s standards itself, and its readers perform to those.