Thank you. That's what years of reddit and hating dubbed media will do for you :) my native language is German, and we do start learning English here pretty early in life. When I was young, we started at 8, but today it's sometimes even earlier. But sadly since I'm out of school my speaking skills are a little rusty, since I don't practice them enough.

Yes, I definitely felt that because of the expectations they had, i had to go the extra mile every time or I'd be worse than someone fulfilling already low expectations. But inevitably, you cannot go the extra mile all the time, so you ket some things slide, and they snowball and then you need to work extra extra hard to keep things from spinning out.

But then, many people's success is earned through way shadier means than "working harder than needed".