Can We Thrive Without Being Competitive?

I've never been excited by competition. I'm happiest when left alone to do my own thing, and if someone comes along bragging they can do it better, I'm inclined to agree with them so they'll leave me alone.

Back in high school, our gym teacher had a banner hanging on the wall. It said, "LEAD, FOLLOW, OR GET OUT OF THE WAY."

You can guess which option I chose.

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What confused me most about sports was the idea that there could only be one leader and one winner, and that that person should be praised and celebrated above all others. In a road-race or a tennis match, maybe this made sense. But even then, did it really matter who crossed the line a tenth of a second before the next guy, or who was able to return the most serves? What about questions of form and grace and persistence? What about having a good time?

There were always greater forces at play. What use is a football coach or a gym teacher if nobody wants to compete at sports?

It isn't really "who wins" that's important to maintain our status quo, but that we constantly celebrate the idea of winning. It's a way of motivating everyone on a team to perform their best, whatever the cost. We need to have this psychology in place so that when kids graduate into the business world, they're motivated to work harder, sell harder, and look for solutions to problems that are more effective and efficient than the competition.

But this attitude also makes us short-sighted, calculating, and cut-throat. It's also wrecking the planet and making us miserable.

We've modeled our economy on a sporting event. The winners get fancy cars and steak dinners while the losers walk barefoot and hungry. If we didn't instill the idea of competition from an early age, would people really want to play? Especially when they saw how few winners there were, and how very many losers?

If people didn't want to play, if they stopped being interested in chasing high scores in money and status, would the economy, and the society it supports, collapse?

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I was attracted to the arts at a young age because they offered a respite from the hyper-competitive chest-thumping of sports. Artists are given a pass to "get out of the way."

As Jordan Peterson points out in his lectures, artists operate outside of the typical dominance hierarchy, venturing beyond the bounds of society in their attempt to confront the unknown.

As I was studying music, and the piano specifically, I had a fairly well-bounded realm in which to pursue truth and beauty - the notes on the page and 88 keys with which to translate them through pressure and pattern. But once you achieve a certain level of technical mastery over a piece, there are endless opportunities for interpretation and expression that are equally valid. This is why you can listen to Evgeny Kissin and Glenn Gould perform the same piece, and have a completely different experience of the music.

Unfortunately artists also need money and support (and therefor some kind of sponsorship) in order to survive. Even in the music world, the institution of "The Competition" has become central to the pursuit of a successful career. The market just doesn't have room for that many performing classical pianists. The farther I progressed, the more performance started to resemble a sporting competition, and the less I wanted to do with it.

In other areas of the arts, the idea of competition can be especially corrosive. How can two entirely different paintings be judged against each other, or two different poems? By the consensus of large number of viewers' subjective reactions, perhaps? By voting? I would never argue that every painting is a good one, or that there's no such thing as "bad poetry" (because I've certainly read enough bad poetry). But I do think that our impulse to select a "winner," which is programmed into us from childhood, is antethetical to the pleasurable contemplation of art.

I don't think it's the right attitude to carry into other areas of our lives, either.

Consider love and sex. The rise of competitive dating and predatory hook-ups has people abandoning meaningful relationships in the pursuit of "something better," to the tremendous detriment of children and families. Or work, where the results of the next quarterly report can make or break an entire career. Business decisions become short-sighted and destructive. Institutions collapse while company insiders get rich betting against their own enterprise while stockholders take the fall.

Work should be something that feeds and sustains us, but going into the office feels more like entering a gladatiorial ring.

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People have always competed for jobs and sexual partners, but more recently we've been given new metrics to measure our success in areas of our lives that were never competitive before. Fitness trackers turn a pleasant walk in the woods into a quest for the greatest amount of steps. Likes and upvotes have change the old high-school popularity contest into a battle for digital dominance. Christ, even reading has taken on a competitive edge as people obsess about how many books they've finished on Amazon and Goodreads.

All of these competitions benefit the trackers more than the tracked, by the way. Just as sporting events make team owners into billionaires, our efforts to dominate social spaces of our apps reward us with feelings of validation while they funnel the real cash to the creators of the technology. But we're so hard-wired to be competitive that we hardly notice.

Personally, I've never been interested in being the best at anything. Maybe I'm weak. Maybe I just don't have the attention span to do any one thing long enough to master it. I'm happy when I can play a piece on the piano to my personal satisfaction, when I can tell a story that communicates clearly with my words, when I can work out enough to keep fit, when I can take a photograph that conveys the beauty of a place and a sense of what I felt there. I'm happy with "good enough" because there's just too much stuff to enjoy to get hung up on perfection.

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Photo by Alejandro Escamilla on Unsplash

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I'm not saying this is the right attitude to have. It certainly hasn't rewarded me financially. I've never developed any one skill enough to make a meaningful "career" out of it, and when I have to take a job to make ends meet, I'm perfectly happy doing something mundane.

There are 7.5 billion people in the world. For any given measure of success, only a few of them can be "the best". This culture of competition is just condemning the vast, vast majority of people to feel like "losers," when in fact they're doing just fine.

On the other hand, competition is wired into our genetics at the deepest level. "Survival of the fittest" drives genetics. In a literal sense, competition is genetics. But does that mean it has to be the driving force for society and culture, too?

What do you think?