Backwards Blog
Core Values in Western Capitalist Discourse Part 4/5
Out-performing Ourselves: A Friendly Little Chat About Crushing the Competition.
What is Competition?
There are several definitions of competition in both the Cambridge and Oxford dictionaries, but they all revolve around a central idea: a person or group striving to be better or more successful than another person or group. What counts as "better" or "more successful" varies, as we will get to in a minute, but the core concept involves a kind of striving that aims to surpass others.
Implicit in this is a notion of hierarchy—of comparing ourselves to determine where we stand in terms of ranking or status. With competition, someone is ahead, and someone is behind. However, competition is not solely about comparison and ranking; it also involves the effort, the context, and the values that define how success is measured or even looks like.
It is in how we see success, and how we measure it, that things become a bit less neutral. What counts as success is greatly influenced by the system you're in and what that system values. In capitalism, profit, productivity, market share are very common measures of success. In school, it's grades or test scores. In social life, it might be popularity, looks or influence. Our cultures values shape not just what we strive for, but, by virtue of how success is defined, it shapes who gets seen—and who gets ignored. When we compete toward narrow, sociatelly defined goals, we don’t just embark on a comparison carosel that labels us winners and losers, we reinforce hierarchies, and sideline excellence in areas we have become blind t. Life can become a constant exercise in measurement and comparison: a race that no one really signed up for—but one we all have to keep running.
Even so, we so tend to think of competition is natural. Good, even. We see competition as driving progress. It's how evolution works—survival of the fittest and all that. Just think about some of the ways we we talk about it:
• Healthy competition—as if it’s good for you.
• Friendly competition—as if it brings us closer.
• Fair play/ Fair/ Open competition—as if the playing field is ever really level.
We also talk about “measuring up” or “not measuring up,” making it pretty clear what competition results in - comparing ourselves to one another using a specific kind of yardstick. The effect of constantly comparing ourselves to others will be discussed later. For now, it is helpful to note that these ways of talking about competition – as healthy, fair and even friendly – reflect how we tend to see competition when things are running relatively smoothly. However, when scarcity isn’t front and center, when the stakes feel higher, there is a shift. The language hardens. Scarcity, threat, or fear of falling behind—these crank up the volume on aggression. We start to see competition as something with more teeth – as something fierce.
Business settings illustrate this well. Now I don’t know how many of you have worked in multinational firms, but I had the eye opening experience of doing so for a while and I can tell you one thing. Business loves two kinds of metaphors. The favorite is sport metaphors – and it got to the stage that if anyone else started saying “win the business,” “level playing field,” or “team player” I would have purchased a baseball bat just to prove to them how dangerous sports can really be. Actually, if you guys have had similar experiences, please write what sport metaphors they liked to use in your workplace in the comments underneath. I would be interested to see them.
In any case, the place I worked seemed to love framing everything as if it was a sports game. Something interesting about sport is that it is like a sort of purified form of competition, where competing is really ALL that’s going on. It is the motivation and the action all in one. There are no deep moral questions to be asked when all you are doing is seeing who can shoot the most goals. Sport is morally NEUTRAL. When businesses use sport metaphors they are suggesting that they are similarly neutral - that when they do a takeover or a downsizing, it is all just about being competitive – and there is no tragedy or loss or hurt in it for those, say, being sacked afrer 10 years of service and are now unable to feed their families. It is simply a way for a company to remain competitive, or even have a competitive edge.
The way businesses use sports metaphors tells us something about how they are used in wider contexts - to distract from moral questions before they could come up: to gloss over the human impact of what they might cause.
There was a second kind of metaphor that the particular multi-national liked to use, back in the 90s, when I worked there. When the stakes got higher, other underlying drives became apparent. The language crossed a line from friendly play into war-like terminology. Scarcity, threat, or fear of falling behind—these cranked up the volume on aggression. I heard sentences like:
• Crush, slaughter or eliminate the competition.
• Dominate the market.
• Shooting down an idea
• Going in for the kill
These metaphors not only reinforce competitive, adversarial thinking—they can also normalize stress, urgency, and conflict as expected features of professional life. I’d be very interested to know the more war-like phrases you hear on a regular basis too. Please put them in the comments underneath – maybe with the branch/ industry as well.
The point is, even the so-called neutral phrases—competitive advantage, market leader, disruptor—show us how competition frames our perception of certain activities. Along with the normalising of conflict, stress and urgency: domination comes to be seen as excellence. Undermining others comes to be seen as strategy. If you can outmaneuver someone, that’s not a moral problem—it’s proof you're more “fit.”
We have come to see competition as just part of the big old game of life. The repercussions are worth considering – we don’t have to think about the people being pushed out, bought out, burned out. We don’t have to worry about those who have drawn the conclusion that they can’t measure up, and hide away in shame, on their own, for fear of hearing yet again that they arent good enough. Framing things as competition does encourage us to think that those who can’t cut it are weak, or losers or just not up to it – even if those people are ourselves. And let’s be honest: this “game” - life - is not one you can refuse to opt into.
That’s right, this competition isn’t actually optional. You can’t show up to work and say, “Hey, I’m gonna sit this one out. I’m not here to compete.” It’s baked into how we organize everything—work, school, culture. It even infiltrates areas like the search for companionship, where I heard one friend say “I’m in a different league”. More sports. More comparison, more hopelessness.
And something we will talk about more later in the episode is that, unlike sports, a lot of the competition in our lives is not a fair match. There aren’t two teams in the same level. There aren’t even well-matched players striving to be the fastest, strongest, best or whatever. All of this competition takes place within the context of power structures that dress up the so-called “game” as a meritocracy.
Summary: What We Think Competition Is
In summary though, in terms of what we think of as competition - we think of it as natural, fair, and even healthy—a kind of motivational tool that pushes us to be our best. Wrapped in phrases like “friendly competition” or “level playing field,” it sounds like sport: balanced, fun, maybe even noble, and certainly nothing to get all morally inquisitive about.
Yet beneath that language is a deeper reality. Competition isn’t neutral or optional—it’s a cultural script shaped by specific values, especially in capitalist systems. It tells us what success looks like, who gets to win, and who’s excluded. It teaches us to compare ourselves to others with a measuring stick that isn’t of our making. It pits us against each other; devides us into units trying to outdo other units, ranks us in order of “bestness,” on it’s own terms, and labels this empowerment. In terms of loneliness and our disconnection from one another, competition is a serious factor. We are not in this together, we are being ranked and compared AGAINST each other. We will go into this more deeply in the section on the shadow side, but for now, lets move on to why we love the idea of competition… for those of us that actually do, at least.
So Why So we like the idea of competition?
Let’s be generous for a moment. There is something deeply compelling about winning, for some people. For some, it acts as a drver and motivation. Even beyond winning though, the prospect of it can seem to be about energy, focus, growth, and the sense of becoming more than you were before. “I’m not trying to beat anyone,” some say. “I’m just trying to be better than I was yesterday.”Fair enough. There’s something noble in that—at least on the surface. Competition, framed this way, is about pushing limits, testing your edge. It can feel exhilarating, purposeful, even alive. It gives structure to ambition, a goal to reach for, and sometimes, a clear measure of progress. It gives us a way to measure our “worth.” Those numbers, when we have one that sets us firmly in a definitional area of “good” can help keep the self-doubt at bay awell. In a world full of uncertainty, there’s comfort in knowing what the rules are—even if they’re hard. And there is certainly comfort in knowing you are definitely, according to official measures, OK, or even good, or even excellent.
For many people—especially those raised to equate worth with performance—competition can become a way to feel seen. A way to feel real. There’s a clarity to competition that’s deeply appealing: You know where you stand. You either made the team or you didn’t. You won or you lost. It simplifies the complexity of life into a legible scoreboard. No need to ask who you are.
Underpinning a lot of this is a worrying of fact: the appeal of competition tends to fall to its ability to stroke our ego. Where some might be happy with knowing that a certain number certifies that they are “ok” or “healthy”, many move into that territory where it is only via being better than others at something, that they feel validation and self-worth. In a world that often bases value on how we compare to others (whether in beauty, intelligence, or success), being “better than” can be a kind of victory. It’s an easy way to boost our self-esteem—even if it’s based on arbitrary or shallow standards that we didn’t even set ourselves. When all else gives way, and your carefully built up self esteem collapses, knowing that you got more likes for your dick pick than anyone else on dickpic dot com may be the very thing that stops you from offing yourself.
On Constantly Comparing and Feeling Inferior.
This wanting to be better than others is not a made up thing. Alfred Adler, an early psychoanalyst, was very interested in Inferiority & Superiority Complexes. This was around the time of Freud who was also interested in the theme – but had become somewhat distracted by calling people anal and insisting that all dreams were metaphors for fucking. Adler argued that people are driven by a need to overcome feelings of inferiority, often by comparing themselves to others. Through this kind of lens, competition becomes a way to prove we’re not “less than.”
Adler also suggested that western societies, with their emphasis on individual achievement, easily foster superiority complexes—a kind of emotional armor designed to protect ourselves from what is actually our own deep insecurity and fear of being found lacking. The gap that opens up beween that pretend-superiority and the inner, felt-inferiority is not considered healthy by most psychologists. BUT, it is worth noting that Adler himeslef saw the act of striving for superiority as potentially going either way. It could be healthy (striving for mastery) or unhealthy (dominating others).
Another psychologist whose work helps us understand why we so love competition is Leon Festinger. He worked on what he called Social Comparison Theory, suggesting that we automatically compare ourselves to others to evaluate our own worth. He actually suggests that this comparing ourselves to others is a fundamental drive. Critics do step in here. They argue that this instinct is greatly amplified by Western capitalist systems, where media, metrics, and meritocracy train us to do it constantly.
Comparison, Superiority and Narcissism
This brings me to a topic we are going to be dealing with in way more depth some time in the future, but that has a solid place here. Another crucial part of why being better than others holds so much appeal is one that both philosophers and psycholoists are increasingly pointing out: our society, as a whole and in terms of the individuals within it, is becoming ever more narcissistic.
Now, you don’t have to be a person with full blown NPD to have narcissistic traits, and without going into the full detail about all the elements of narcissism, one key element is a constant, insatiable need for validation. Needing validation isnt a binary thing, by the way, like those who need it vs those who do not. Everyone needs to be positively mirrored by others to some degree; it’s part of how we form our sense of self.
But in terms of the psychological patterns of narcissism, this need is insatiable. If validation were alcohol, most of us might be casual drinkers—some perhaps binge a little on weekends. Narcissism, by contrast, is full-blown, hardcore, wake up in your on excrememt, alcoholism.
In The Culture of Narcissism (1979), Christopher Lasch argued that capitalist societies breed a deep hunger for validation. Lasch isn’t talking about individual pathology though. He is all about what society and it’s systems rewards. Capitalism prizes performance, visibility, and image. Narcissism, in this context, is less of a flaw, and more of a rational adaptation to survive in a society built on constant comparison, eroded community, and self-branding. When all this is going on – competition, comparison, and the rest - people become overly self-focused, image-conscious, and emotionally isolated.
In a narcissistic culture, competition is thrilling not just because of the prize—but because of the spectacle of winning. Being a winner feeds that need we talked about above– to see ourselves as superior and uniquene. Carol Dweck talks about this in terms of what she calls Fixed vs Growth Mindsets. While Dweck doesn’t focus on narcissism or endorse competition, her theory of fixed mindsets shows how people who believe ability is innate can become obsessed with proving their worth. Her theory shows how people with a fixed mindset believe ability is innate, which makes them hyper-sensitive to comparison and often addicted to “winning.” In other words, competition is enjoyable for those people whose identities are tied to being “naturally better” than others. That is, those who require external validation and constant acknoledgement of their superiority.
Breifly, here are a few other thinkers with ideas on why we like competition.
1. Herbert Marcuse – One-Dimensional Man (1964)
• Suggests that in advanced capitalism, people are trained to enjoy their own domination, and...
• Being taught to like competition helps disguise our oppression as freedom (“you’re free to compete!”) thus keeping us from questioning the system itself.
3. Byung-Chul Han – The Burnout Society
This guy actually taught at a uni in the town where I live. I kid you not! Anyway,
• Han argues that neoliberalism turns us into self-exploiters, constantly competing with ourselves in the name of “optimization.”
• We enjoy competition because it gives us a sense of autonomy and achievement—even as we burn out.
4. Slavoj Žižek – Ideological Enjoyment
You have probably figured out by now that I cannot get through a single episode without mentioning Zizek. My dog is not named after him for nothing!
• Žižek suggests that we enjoy ideologies even when they harm us.
• In capitalism, competition isn't just a burden—it’s something we’re trained to love, because it creates identity and meaning, especially in the absence of deeper social bonds.
In summary:
Competition is appealing because it fulfills deep psychological and societal needs. From a psychological perspective, it helps individuals validate their self-worth by comparing themselves to others, as theorized by Adler and Festinger. In a capitalist society, as Lasch and Marcuse highlight, competition becomes tied to personal identity and social status, reinforcing narcissistic tendencies and masking underlying social inequalities. The drive to win or outperform others is amplified by a system that rewards individual achievement, creating a sense of autonomy or superiority. Moreover, as Dweck’s research on mindsets shows, those with a fixed view of abilities find competition particularly motivating because it offers a tangible way to prove their inherent value. However, this obsession with success often comes at the cost of mental health, as noted by Han, who discusses how neoliberalism turns competition into a form of self-exploitation. Žižek also points out that our enjoyment of competition is often ideologically driven, serving the interests of capitalism while distracting from deeper societal issues.
The Shadow Side of Competition.
For those of you asking, what is wrong with being the best you can be? We have already looked at how the question itself makes the idea of competing (being the best) seem benign. It detracts from any moral consequences in a similar way to sport metahors. We have also discussed the fact that definitions of “best” are set by forces external to us – by our culture and what it values. Here we are going to talk about the element of striving, and what we lose through it.
Survival of the Fittest
We do have to start by calling out some emporer nakedness here. Somewhat akin to last week's episode, where cognitive primacy turned out to be scientifically untenable, our ideas of competition—that it fuels progress and ensures fairness—are also built on shaky ground. Take the phrase "survival of the fittest." It wasn’t Darwin’s! It was coined by Herbert Spencer, a 19th-century social theorist whose reading of Darwin made you question if he could actually read at all. Darwin himself, especially in The Descent of Man, emphasized sympathy, cooperation, and mutual aid as essential to our survival. Spencer, however, morphed Darwin’s work into a justification for capitalism, colonialism, and hierarchy. It was Spencer who pushed the brutal arena version of life, where each individual must be the best or die, and that interpretation stuck. It became the mantra of a system that rewards domination and calls it excellence.
Some people, understandably, knew enough about what Darwin was really on about to rail at Spencers claims. Peter Kropotkin pushed us to remember that cooperation—not competition—is whats’ central to survival. Stephen Jay Gould and even Daniel Dennett echoed that view, reminding us that the “every man for himself” worldview is not even science—it’s ideology. Still, the myth lives on. It saturates our workplaces, schools, relationships, and our sense of who we are and what we are worth. It teaches us to measure our value by comparison, not connection. You gotta ask: who benefits from this worldview? And what does it cost us?
What Competition, and the Comparison it Entails, Costs us.
1. Competition Undermines Trust
We’ll get to who benefits soon enough, but let’s begin with what it costs us. The first thing is that competition quietly erodes trust. Not just trust in terms of emotional closeness, but the basic feeling of psychological safety around others. In a culture that prizes comparison, trust becomes risky. We learn to see others not as companions in our shared uncertainty, but as potential rivals—people whose success could eclipse our own. The logic is simple and based on an the idea of scarcity: if there’s not enough “success” to go around, then your gain might be my loss. If I want that success, and you stand to “take it” from me, it will change how I interact with you. I might withhold, avoid you, become wary and strategic. When this kind of behaviour becomes habit, even friendship becomes transactional.
Here’s a real-world example of what I mean, and it covers a few points extra too. It’s from my music days that really stuck with me.
I used to play a lot of those shows where there are 3 or more bands, along with festivals and other multiple-act scenarios. There was a noticeable pattern: the bands who treated other performers as competition were cold, closed off, and honestly kind of miserable to be around. You’d say hi and get a grunt. No eye contact. No camaraderie. Just this unspoken tension, like we were all fighting for some imaginary top spot. Keep in mind that once you are there, the “top slot” had already been decided.
Now, the bands who didn’t buy into that mindset—who saw other musicians as peers, not threats, were fun. Open. Supportive. There was banter, collaboration, shared gear, spontaneous jam sessions and convos until 3am. It was community. It was connection.
Yet, more and more we see these “battle of the bands” things, and ranking of one musical act against another. We encourage it so much that it has filtered down into scenes that should want nothing to do with such commercial bullshit. Cos think about this—have you ever met a music fan who only listens to one band? Someone who buys one album and then refuses to ever enjoy another artist again because they’ve already picked “the best”? Of course not. That’s fucking absurd. We don’t have less love per band when we love more than one band either. Yet, competition is foist upon us, and really, it just makes doing shows with those who have internalised that whole “maximise our success” and “be the best” mentality fucking tedious.
This points to an even deeper mechanism that lies behind how competition and comparison alientate us from each other. This is about how we, ourselves, internalise the competitive gaze. Those bands who saw it all as a competition? Well that is an example of what’s to follow.
If we keep comparing ourselves to others—we start to realise, or assume, that others may be doing the same to us. If we’re judging ourselves against impossible yardsticks, we can assume everyone else is too. That assumption—that we are always being measured—creates a kind of ambient self-consciousness, a sense of being on display. Of being watched by judging eyes. Time for a super fascinating idea of Sartre’s. He called this “the look” but it was a foundational aspect for a lot of stuff to come, so we’ll call it what it came to be known as in a broader sense – “the gaze”.
Let’s quickly jump back to Foucault, who I mentioned last episode. If you didn’t hear the episode on cognitive primacy, do go back and listen to it. This is a really important idea. As a quick recap, in a circular prison, where a watcher sits in the middle, the inmates know how the watcher wants them to behave, and they o not want to be punished. However, they cannot see if that watcher is actually there or not. So they do something Foucault calls “internalisning the watcher,” meaning they police themselves to behave as the watcher would want them to, even when that watcher isnt there. This is also called “internalising the gaze.”
Well, Sartre takes this idea and hones in on how people want to be seen, BY others. I.e. as great/ successful/ worthy/ unique/ better etc. We want them to judge us favorably, in order to feel better about ourselves. In a society that values competition, this results in a world where we are (or feel we are) constantly evaluating and comparing others to ourselves, and they are doing the same thing to us. Even if they are NOT doing the same thing to us, we still THINK they are. Sartre points out that in the moment we are seen – by these comparing, judging others, it changes how we act. We begin to perform ourselves – you know, that version of you with the smile you use in selfies, and the confidence you learned to fake from a book claiming to know “what your target gender finds attractive”. That version of you that nods and tries to look they they understand absolutely everything that could be linked in any way to the area of expertese you wrote donw in your linked in profile, lest someone think you are NOT an expert. We perform ourselves rather than just being ouselves. In a way, it's like we’re the main character in a film that we imagine others are watching—trying to be admirable, desirable, competent, etc., according to what we think they value.
We’re constantly adjusting ourselves based on where we believe we stand in the imagined eyes of others. In his famous work Being and Nothingness, Sartre explores how we tend to define ourselves through what others think of us, or how we THINK they see us. We’re not just managing impressions in our performance of ourselves; we’re managing survival in a system where being behind, or less than, feels like being unsafe. The thing is, when we are constantly performing instead of being, it undermines of our very sense of self. We come full circle, to what Dweck, Lasch and others discuss. When we lack a sense of self, it feels awful. When we don’t know who we are, we seek reflections and validation from others, in order to try and find out. We hunt out those judgements of “good at x” or “the best at y.”
It should be pretty clear that all of this is not conducive to flourishing. Gabor Maté is one of my favoriate authors on connection in the modern world, comes to this from a sociological angle. He shows how chronic performance in survival mode, specifically, makes connection feel dangerous. In other words, how it erodes trust If we’re always being watched—real or imagined—we’ll never risk being real. Maté’s work shows how survival-based living—where success feels scarce and failure feels fatal—closes the door on emotional intimacy. We can’t afford to be vulnerable if we’re in constant competition. And we wonder why we feel so lonely. Wonder no more, friends. Yet another inbuilt reason that we are.
And is there an alternative? Martha Nussbaum suggests that something quite the oppositee of compeition is what fosters human fourishing. Her capabilities approach suggests that human flourishing is not contingent on dominance or comparison, but on nurtured vulnerability, empathy, and interdependence. Sound a bit more like what Darwin originally said? Yep. However, for Nussbaum, nurturing, empathy, interdependence etc require safety. This makes sense too. How easy is it to, say, look after a baby when there are lions prowling about, or when every member of your tribe is trying to kill each other to prove they are the strongest? Safety is vital, but very hard to come by when competition underpins everything we do. When we are forced us to perform strength at all times. We are kept in battle mode, time poor, constantly scared of failure, loss, or being pushed out to the sidelines. Those pending assessments, exams, perfrmance reviews, all of it keeps us hooked on measuring up. All of it keeps our focus on external definitions of good enough.
Going Deeper into Self-Alienation
It is worth going more deeply into what the effect of internalised competition does inside us. As mentioned, Over time, we don’t just compare ourselves to others—we internalize a hypercritical voice that measures us against impossible ideals. We develop an internal audience, a kind of internalized “gaze” that is constantly asking: Are you winning? Are you enough yet?
There is another angle to this - Power. In the disciplinary society, Michel Foucault shows how power becomes most efficient when it turns inward. We become self-surveilling machines, regulating our own behavior, appearance, productivity, and even emotions to stay competitive. We treat ourselves like projects to optimize, rather than people to nurture.
Judith Butler’s theory of performativity deepens this. We are constantly performing identities—curated, stylized selves that we hope will be accepted and rewarded. But over time, we lose track of who we are when we’re not performing. And Carl Jung warned that the more we conform to an outer image, the more estranged we become from the true self.
This self-alienation isn’t harmless. It chips away at self-compassion. It creates anxiety, shame, and disconnection. And because competition never lets us rest, there’s no pause button. No space to fall apart, to ask for help, or to simply exist without having to prove anything. It’s a treadmill with no off-switch, and the longer we’re on it, the further we drift from who we really are.
Success and the Individual – a Hero Narrative in the Making
Success and the Hero Narrative
Let’s return briefly to something we explored in the earlier episode on individualism and the hero narrative. Where there is success, there is almost always a personal story—a mythic arc. And in the Western tradition, especially under capitalism, that arc is structured around the lone hero: the one who triumphs against the odds, who rises through talent or grit or divine uniqueness. If you can narrate your life as a “rise to success,” then you’ve successfully become the protagonist of your own epic. You’ve made it.
But here's the catch: if you are the hero, everyone else becomes part of your story. That means people are no longer complex, autonomous beings with stories of their own—they’re obstacles to overcome, side characters, “supporting roles” who either help you advance or need to be pushed aside. This is the instrumentalisation of other people baked into the logic of heroic competition. You are the one who must rise—and if others are struggling, that just confirms your superiority.
Even spiritual frameworks that claim to rise above ego often reproduce this. Ever noticed how some folks on a “healing journey” turn other people’s bad behaviour into “lessons” meant for their own growth? You’re not dealing with an asshole—you’ve been gifted a Yoda. That coworker who undercut you? They’re there to test your ego. That ex who ghosted you? A divine teacher in disguise. This isn’t deep enlightenment. It’s self-centered myth-making. It’s another hero narrative.
It is also, underneath all the flowy linen and compulsory good vibes, very narcissistic: if all these people were sent to teach you something, then clearly some benevolent cosmic force is tracking your progress like a personal trainer with a clipboard. It’s still a success narrative—but with more eccanacia and toxic positivity. You’re not only the hero of your story, you’re the student of the universe, being personally coached by fate itself. It’s spirituality as main-character syndrome: the world revolves around your personal growth. Everyone else? Props. Triggers. Plot devices. It’s narcissism in soft-focus, with a healing crystal on top.
And like all myths under capitalism, it becomes performative. As long as you can craft the right story—complete with hardship, breakthrough, and redemption—then it doesn’t even matter if you feel fulfilled. You look like you’ve won. Philosopher Alain de Botton names this directly: success isn’t about living a meaningful life anymore—it’s about looking enviable. About appearing to “win” the game, even if it’s slowly killing you inside.
This leads, inevitably, to alienation. Erich Fromm warned of this decades ago: societies that overvalue achievement and individual triumph – even when the ‘achievement’ is enlightenment itself - create people who are anxious, disconnected, and lonely. You become a stranger to your own needs. Your worth becomes tethered to applause.
Gabor Maté takes it a step further. In a world where we’re all pretending to be fine, there’s no room to say, “I’m struggling too.” And so we don’t. We curate. We perform. We break down alone. And all the things that would foster connection—our failures, our grief, our humanity—get labelled as weakness. As unworthy. As a threat to the hero story. And in that story, no one else really matters—unless they’re helping you win.
And the Real Winners Are…..!
Let’s not kid ourselves—competition didn’t just randomly become the water we swim in. It’s been installed, fed, and normalized for a reason. And that reason isn’t because it helps you live your best life.
The real winners of a competition-saturated culture aren’t the people who burn out trying to “be enough.” They’re the ones who profit from our self-doubt. Our constant striving. Our quiet shame. Capitalist systems thrive when we’re isolated, overworking, and obsessed with improvement—because isolated people buy more. Lonely people are easier to manipulate. The disillusioned look for gurus who claim to have answers. Anxious people work harder for less. All of them question themselves instead of the system.
And the obsession with measuring? That serves institutions. Schools, corporations, dating apps, social media platforms—all of them function by sorting and ranking us. They need us to compete so they can extract value: productivity, attention, money, obedience. The more we internalize their standards, the less we ask where they came from—or who they serve.
And it’s not just economic. Social hierarchies—racism, patriarchy, classism—also benefit. If we’re too busy competing with each other, we’re less likely to organize together. If we see the person next to us as a rival, not a comrade, we’re not going to tear down the structures that keep us both in place. Divide and conquer still works, and competition—especially when it’s framed as “just human nature”—does a damn good job of keeping us divided.
So when we ask who benefits?, the answer is: those already holding the power. Those who’ve convinced us that our value must be earned through struggle. Those who sell us the idea that if we just work a little harder, smile a little more, outperform our peers—then we’ll be safe. Loved. Seen. Whether they’re selling us a promotion, a soulmate, or a “higher self,” the message is the same: keep striving. Keep comparing. Keep buying. It’s a lie. But it’s a profitable one.
Summary: What We Learned About Competition (and Ourselves)
Let’s pull this all together. At first glance, competition looks harmless—even healthy. We're told it motivates us, drives innovation, and helps us "be our best selves." Wrapped in sports metaphors and self-help language, it’s been sold to us as fair, natural, and even fun. But dig a little deeper, and the story starts to crack. Competition, it turns out, is not just a personal quirk or motivational tool—it’s a system. One that’s embedded into how we work, how we relate, how we live. And it’s doing damage.
We saw that what gets measured as “success” is defined by the culture we live in—and that culture often values profit, productivity, looks, status. Things that aren’t neutral. Things that exclude. So when we compete, we're not striving toward some universal truth of excellence. We're climbing ladders someone else built, often without asking who they were built for—or who was left at the bottom.
We looked at why competition is so appealing: it offers clarity, validation, and the illusion of control. It lets us feel like we’re “winning” at something, even if we’re losing ourselves in the process. From Adler and Festinger to Lasch, Dweck, and Žižek, we explored how comparison becomes identity. How competition becomes ideology. How the ego’s craving for reassurance keeps us stuck chasing the next gold star. We even saw how systems teach us to love our own domination, how we become self-policing, brand-managing, burnout-prone little productivity bots, quietly eroding our mental health and connection to others.
We also saw what competition costs us. It corrodes trust. It turns friends into rivals. It teaches us to see others as measuring sticks rather than mirrors. Through Sartre’s gaze and Foucault’s panopticon, we looked at how this system gets inside our heads—how we become actors in our own lives, performing instead of being. And through the lens of Maté, Nussbaum, and Fromm, we saw how this performance isolates us. How connection requires safety, and how safety requires trust—and how competition quietly undoes both.
We dug into the hero narrative too—that seductive, self-centering myth that tells us success makes us the protagonist, and everyone else a side character. Even spirituality isn’t immune. When everything becomes a lesson “sent” to make you grow, everyone else becomes your teacher, your trigger, your tool. It's still about winning—but with incense. It’s narcissism in soft lighting.
Finally, we asked: who benefits from all this? And the answer wasn’t you or me. The real winners are those who profit from our disconnection. From our self-doubt. From our relentless drive to prove we matter. Institutions and ideologies thrive when we compete and conform, when we rank ourselves, when we try to earn belonging instead of just claiming it.
So yeah—this isn't just about hustle culture or bad vibes on LinkedIn. It’s about a system that keeps us apart, exhausted, and unsure of our worth. And the only way out isn’t to be the best. It’s to stop playing their game.
Post Script – How Do We Opt Out Of The Game?
“The forest would be silent if only the best birds sang.”
If competition isolates us, then the antidote isn’t just “being nicer”—it’s choosing connection over comparison, wherever we can. That doesn’t mean opting out of ambition or achievement. It means questioning the yardsticks we use to measure worth. It means noticing when we're sizing others up—or ourselves—and choosing, instead, to be in relationship.
We can’t dismantle structural systems alone, but we can chip away at their grip by practicing solidarity, refusing to perform perfection, and reaching for mutual care over individual branding. Gabor Maté reminds us that regulation—emotional safety—comes through co-regulation. That means we need each other. We heal in relation, not in isolation.
It also means remembering that success is not a moral condition. You don’t have to “win” at life to deserve rest, love, friendship, or meaning. The idea that we do is a lie—one we’ve inherited from systems that profit off our isolation. You don’t have to be exceptional. You just have to be human.
Small Acts of Resistance Against Competitive Culture
1. Share something imperfect on purpose.
Post a song, a sketch, a voice memo. Don’t polish it. Don’t caption it with “I know this isn’t great.” Just share. Let it be enough. Let it be part of the forest.
2. Compliment someone without comparison.
Not “you’re smarter than X” or “better than most.” Just: you are. See what it feels like to notice beauty, brilliance, or tenderness without ranking it.
3. Ask for help.
Choose one small thing you could ask for support with this week. Notice if shame or resistance comes up. Do it anyway. Let yourself be held.
4. Celebrate a Failure—Loudly, Kindly, On Purpose.
Not the self-deprecating kind that secretly performs humility, but a real one. Something that didn’t work. Something you messed up. Celebrate it for what it is: proof you’re not a machine, not a brand, not an algorithm—just a person learning as they go. Share it with someone who can laugh and stay kind. Let it be a reminder that we are allowed to try and fall and still be deeply worthy of connection.
5. Reach out to someone who might feel behind.
Not to “inspire” them, not to fix them—just to say: You’re not alone. I see you. You’re not failing at being human.
I am going to do number 4 with you here. I once released a soundtrack album that was pretty bad. A fan came up to me once and said "I do like your music Jordan, but "the loneliest of creatures"? What the fuck were you thinking?" He thought that album was awful – and it was! I celebrate that, and it WAS fucking hilarious. Every musician has to have a worst album. It is unavoidable. I was stoked that this one was already a few albums ago, and I could laugh about it loudly. That;s the idea. This shit makes us human. The exercises above are intended to help us all remember and celebrate that. I’d love to hear your ideas too, on what helps break us out of the eternal race, and what keeps those asking us to run it at bay.