Competition, that is how everything works, If you do not compete then you will be left behind. This is the common thing that everyone says. We do not argue about it and just believe it. Fear of being left behind is real and I think everyone faces that. competitiveness is that you want to strive to be better than everyone and get to the top. Be the best.

There are good positives to this from a certain point of view. You will work harder, you will be motivated, you will want to be better. That’s what I thought, amongst other things.  I went on thinking this for a while but then I asked, why is this competitiveness and competition important?  why is competitiveness so good? The first thought is that there are so many people pursuing the same thing and only one can be at the top or let’s say one percent of people can be on the top. So, inherently 99 percent of people are a dumb, stupid, useless, or unsuccessful? That is pretty depressing. And I thought that this is not right this feels wrong.

Why is competitiveness a bad thing?

I asked myself another question, why do I need to be on the top? What will I accomplish by getting to the top? And I had no answer to this. Which translated to me as I will be as competitive as possible, I will beat the competition all my life and reach this top and then what? what do I do now that I reach the top? And that is where it just started to fall apart. I felt like it is all just a facade, a theatre act just to fool yourself to work. Competitiveness feels like the type of cure that removes the symptoms but does not remove the underlying problem. It is false and a cheap motivation.

Competitiveness should not motivate people, people should not do anything to compete, they should not do it because they want to be better than someone else. You might do something and get to the top with competitiveness as your motivation and then feel lost when you get to the top because you did not actually like what you did. Do things because you enjoy doing them, because you love it. Society drives us towards competitiveness but you should not give in to that societal pressure.

How competitiveness would drive you to become depressed and sad?

Competitiveness is bad enough but it is even more harsh when you are lagging behind. If by any chance you are in the bottom of the percentage hierarchy of people or if you think you are at their bottom then you will always feel under-accomplished, a disgrace, a failure. You are not a failure because you are not at the top. This is complete and utter bullshit that no one should believe in. It is wrong because you have your own skills that you might be really good at but have not found it, or maybe if you stopped comparing yourself to a million other people who are better than you then you might actually have the motivation to be better. For example you are level 13 in your skill and a million people are of level 130, you will look at them and then think that you will never reach there. It is almost next to impossible to get there.You will start to procrastinate. You will lose hope. You will never improve. what if you ignored those million level 130 people? what if you just took a step back and looked at yourself in context of yourself. You might not get to level 130 the next day. But level 14 or 15 is still an improvement.

Why was competitiveness bad for me personally?

Competitiveness is what I used to escape confronting my own objective truth so that I could accept some subjective truth that would give me a dopamine hit.

Sometimes we are scared of ourselves, we are scared to confront our problems. What we do is put these problems behind and choose competitiveness as an escape mechanism.

How do we choose competitiveness as an escape mechanism?

I used to look at people who are doing worse than I am and consolidated myself that I am at least better than these people. Everyone agrees that doing this is bad and yet all of us engage in such thinking exercises, and I did it more often than not. Yes it made me feel good for a sec, it gave me a dopamine hit. The thing it did not do and it never does is that it does not improve you, you are left where you were and that is bad. What I do now is I don’t engage in such thinking and exercise doing my own thing and ignoring where other people are. Now yes ignoring other people sounds a little pretentious, maybe selfish but in this context you should not care where other people are and that are they up to, you must care where you are and are you enjoying what you are doing.

So, yes competitiveness sucks, I myself am not over it completely but I am trying. I guess this helped. If you have anything to say or if you think I am wrong then comment down below.