It is said that when chased by a bear, you don’t need to outrun the bear. You just need to outrun your friend. Human beings took this saying a little too literal and have become ceaselessly competitive. Saying “life is a competition” is no exaggeration. Even in our daily conversations, it is so apparent how we’re all just trying to constantly one-up each other, even if not directly. We don’t hear each other as much as we talk back. We all want to prove that we’ve done more, achieved greater, got more Instagram likes and are just cooler people than the average run of the mill human being. 

Me: 4, You: 3, You: 4, Me: 5, You: 6, Me: 7, You: 7, Me: 8, You: 8, Me: 9, You: 9, Me:10 and so on…..This just gave me a headache! Do you realise that this is how our life works in numerical form?
competition

We realise we’re all in a competition with one another, but we prefer not to acknowledge it. It would be painful to admit or believe it, which is why we’re always telling one another that we all just need to try our best and that it’s all we can do. But when our best is not as good as someone else’s, we can’t help but measures ourselves against the people around us instead of measuring our own personal pace of progress. Some of us are afraid to even try their best in fear that it wouldn’t match up with others’ version of what best looks like. It would be delusional to believe that there isn’t a competition going on.

Achieving mastery at something became less important to us than relative comparison and our ranking among the people around us. This is the only way to explain Keeping Up With The Kardashians’ high viewership. It’s definitely not due to its original and significant content; the reality show feeds on humanity’s inability to set priorities straight.

comparison

Our main goal has become beating our opponents (and nowadays, everyone is an opponent), rather than continuing to develop our own set of skills. What is it? Is it a compulsive obsession with winning? We have reached a point where we can’t define ourselves except in terms of others. The joke’s on us though, because we’ve been trying so hard to best our peers that we failed to notice how ridiculously far we took it. Now, we also try to best others in nonsensical aspects of life.

For instance:

In drugs and alcohol tolerance 

Proving that our drugs and alcohol tolerance is super high has become synonymous with being badass. People have been trying to prove that they can drink a lot without getting drunk because that’s just the new cool.

In relationships/people we’ve been with 

People brag about their conquests all the time because we have foolishly fallen victims to the trap that is more experience. No one can deny that gaining experience is what life’s all about. Yet, we now think that gaining experience from a single relationship is not the same as gaining experience from many relationship types. We think we can’t have tons of adventures, stories and experience by being committed to a single person, so we refrain from committing.

It became as stupid as that.

jealous

We’ve seen Friends; we know how this conversation ends. Seriously, our idea of being better is so messed up and is just a ticking clock for an impending disaster.

Unless we’re winning all the time (which is impossible), life will seem unbelievably unfair to us. Winning is only an outcome and being obsessed with outcomes will lead us to lose sight of the journey, of the little triumphs and stumbles along the way. We won’t learn from our mistakes, because all we care about is the outcome and that it didn’t go as planned. We won’t figure out why it didn’t work out the way we had hoped, because we were too busy staring at the finish line and we won’t understand why we are where we are.

The proverbial ladder we’re all struggling to reach its end is gonna fall off if we’re all trying to latch on simultaneously. The way it should be is that we should all climb our own personal ladder and there should be no time limit as to when we should get to the top.

The only comparison we should ever make: 

Madness