I owe so much to my competitive drive. Competing against others and myself / my own past performance has pushed me to do better and do more at every stage of my life to date. It makes me feel like I should achieve, because those achievements reflect on my worth as an individual.
But as the structure of school falls away behind me, I’m realizing slowly that competition isn’t necessary for me and my growth specifically, but instead instilled within me as an extension of the sytems I’ve been part of since young. In Singapore especially, academic excellence is competition. You beat out everyone else, whether that’s through hard work or parent-bought tuition. Looking at and comparing yourself to others is the default way to negotiate your own relationship to your achievements / your self-worth, and by extension becomes the default way to negotiate your relationship to others. A lot of my friendships with my day-ones from secondary school and JC onwards have been dyed with that comparison and competition since we first met.
I think that there are other ways to negotiate relationships and drive for achievement, but that competition is the default because the System needs it. The Singapore educational system needs competition because it takes a free-market approach to labor, and the country as a whole manages labor efficiently by quantifying and comparing achievement. Thus achievement needs to be tracked and emphasized, via competition, and so that becomes our language for negotiating achievement. I might be stretching a bit, but: capitalism is built on competition. It wouldn’t work without goods and brands and companies competing against each other on everything from prices to quality. When you draw graphs for the labor market in Econ, those are just demand/supply graphs but with people substituted for goods.
And yet, there are other ways to survive beyond competition. Maybe: collaboration?
If we took the lens of competitiveness as one option in a set of them, even if it’s incentivized / reinforced by whatever system we’re in, then competing or being competitive becomes a choice. We might have been put into the race, but there’s still the possibility of voluntarily stepping off the track entirely. I call this opting out.
Ways I practice opting out, because it really is such a work in progress:
- I let others win
- Really common conversation at Cal: “God, I’m so tired, I slept at 2am” / “I slept at 5am, and I’ve three midterms next week” —> when you swallow the competition kool-aid, you compete based on effort too. But this dialogue is just a bid for affirmation (“look how hard I worked! I can’t fail, right?”), that doesn’t necessarily need to conflict in the first place. Wouldn’t everyone be happier if the reply was something more like, “That sounds so tough, are you okay?”
- I step off the track when it’s not my game to win
- I like to think that I’m long past the days when prestige was a big motivating factor for me. But I still did my best to recruit for MBB, and the thought of potentially working for a prestigious company still drew me in.
- But part of my commitment to living with agency is to be intentional about my choices: Past the prestige and the desire to jump on the bandwagon because everyone recruiting for consulting tries for MBB — past all that, I came to the US to work in media. And got pushed into consulting because that was a way to get work authorization as an international student. Consulting is a stepping stone, and MBB/prestige doesn’t matter as long as I get to work in some capacity adjacent to what I love
Some of this is inspired by the Buddhism of my childhood: those basic teachings that you’re dissatisfied because you have desires / you’re unhappy because you’re pursuing happiness / you’re trying to exercise control over the world when you could let go and find contentment. I’m stressed / unhappy / insecure because of the race, not because I lagged behind.
Collaboration
And (this might really only be motivating for me, but) the fact that competition is what fuels the systems of power that enforce inequality, means that being competitive is literally choosing the easy way out. It’s so easy, to be whatever society has told you to be, to run the race it sets you on, to be victorious when it tells you to and to be downtrodden when it tells you to. It’s so easy to be individualistic, to see yourself as a discrete entity, one good in a market of substitutes.
Collaboration is so much harder. And that might make it worthwhile. It’s harder to achieve while not seeing it as a competition, to rise and grow when you don’t let yourself step over and on others to do it. It’s harder to raise yourself while bringing everyone else with you, especially when you’re told you don’t have to or can’t afford to.
Decentering and decentralizing the self is also harder than seeing yourself as one discrete entity. But, to me, recognizing that you are the glue-sticked collage offers a sense of safety that bubble-wrapping my self-esteem in accolades could never afford me.