have to fight against treating each day as some sort of judged competition. It can feel like our brain wants to analyze every action we take, every movement we make, and every thought we think and tally them on some sort of giant scorecard that equals the success of our lives. Here’s your brain’s sports announcer, the play-by-play:
“We’re coming at you live, where Anna O’Brien is just taking the ‘Arena of Life’ floor. Anna will be doing a complicated ‘business lady turned social media star’ routine, with a surprise author flip. Anna starts her routine. So far, we’re seeing a lot of what we expect here at today’s competition. She starts off with the morning dog-walk, followed by a smooth transition into a ‘talking to neighbors and petting her dog’ combination. A solid four points for opening the door for an older woman. She racks up another three for creating a well-thought-out PowerPoint. In a surprise turn of events, Anna has racked up an impressive amount of difficulty points by finally doing those dirty dishes in the sink while also talking her best friend through a bad day. However, she’s now taken a bit of a performance hit for playing Tetris on her phone instead of answering work emails. Anna needs to get refocused on her routine if she hopes to even qualify for tomorrow’s existence. We’ll have final results after the eyes shut. Back to you, Roberta!”
You might be sitting there scratching your head, reading this and thinking, “Anna, this is ridiculous.” And you’re right, it is. There is no scorecard in life. There is no team of highly trained life experts assessing your every choice, trying to decide a perfect number value to assign to your life effort today, or any day really. No one is going to hold up a placard with your worth at the end of each day.
If there is no scorecard to life, why do we often feel like we are constantly in a competition with ourselves, with others, and with the world around us? In this chapter we will dissect how unnecessary comparison leads us to treat our lives like a competition. This, in turn, fuels negative self-talk. I’ll share methods I use to remove competition from my life and reduce unnecessary comparison. We’ll also dissect how not all comparisons are bad. (Some even help us grow!) Lastly, I’ll share tricks I use to reduce competitiveness in my own life.
Life Is Not a Competition
When I was in middle school, you might be shocked to learn I played basketball. I was tall and a decent rebounder, but I could not get that ball to go in the basket to save my life. Basketball, like any competition, had a clear goal: get that orange sphere through the swooshy net the most in the time allotted. So while I was terrible at scoring, I tried to give it my all in defense. I should note that in middle school I was significantly taller than everyone around me, and built like a monster truck. I also let my mother cut my hair into a super feminine and attractive bowl cut, and wore a pair of 1980s coke bottle glasses with a nifty elastic band. I most definitely looked like a scary forty-year-old librarian who was going to punish you for returning your books late. Intimidation is what I brought to the court.
No matter how badass I might have looked, and how much muscle I could bring to the party, I knew there were a clear set of boundaries and rules I had to follow. When you think of something you can “win,” like my basketball game, there’s a clear pattern. Think about it. Competitions have a clear objective, defined before the contest begins, which participants are trying to achieve. The game begins with a clear set of rules you have to follow while trying to achieve the task at hand. And from the time the match begins, your opposition is clearly defined; you know who or what you’re competing against. Lastly, you know when it will all end; the time elapses or the objective is achieved which signals we’re no longer competing and the game is over. Think about your life. It doesn’t fit so well into that architecture, now does it?
Life is not a competition. Unlike a game of basketball we don´t start life knowing what we are trying to achieve. This might sound terrifying. What do you mean my purpose isn’t clear from day one? But think about it, we don’t pop out of our mother’s womb with a roadmap to what we need to achieve for the next ninety-odd years of living. Instead we are built with the raw tools required to discover what we can make of our lives. In this way life is less like a game and more like a work of art. Part of the joy of living is getting to define just what kind of awesome you want to add to the world. Imagine if we didn’t get to choose where we were headed, that wouldn’t be as much fun, now would it?
Many would argue life does have a set of rules, or a moral code. Don’t steal your best friend’s man, no matter how fine he is. Don’t kill your neighbors who like to party at 3 a.m. on a Tuesday. Don’t gossip about Cindy’s deviated septum surgery. However, this code, while applicable most of the time, isn’t set in stone. Moral guides are subject to adapt or change based on the context of the situation. Take, for example, lying. Most people would argue lying is a bad thing, and that we should all be truthful. However, if a dangerous person demanded your home address, would it be wrong if you lied, giving them a false address to protect yourself? In this way many of the moral codes we rely on are not rules, but rather guides to living a more righteous life.
Much like our moral code, our opposition in life is often contextual. As a child you might feel like your competition is your annoying brother or sister. As a teenager it might be a student from a different clique. As an adult it might be a coworker who’s up for the same promotion. But it’s not that simple, now is it? You might feel like you’re competing with multiple people for multiple things all at once, based on different facets of our life. You might feel you need to have a better lasagna recipe than Suzy, while also beating Roger for the promotion at work, while also challenging Margaret for captain of your rec soccer league, while also convincing your boyfriend to settle down with you. If that sentence seems exhausting, it’s because it is. The people in life who challenge us are ever-changing and totally unpredictable.
Lastly, we don’t know when our game is going to end. No, I am not making a morbid reference to death. Does the game end when we die? Or does it end when we achieve a certain number of life milestones? Heck, we don’t even know when the game started. I hardly think the first thing we think popping into this bright beautiful world is, “So glad to be out of that woman’s uterus—I’m ready for this. Game on.”
You wouldn’t play a game that has no clear objective, unclear rules, an ever-changing cast of competitors. So why do we push so hard to treat life as if it’s some grand event we must win?
Getting Out of the Game
In school, we’re taught to compete to be the best. In the workplace, we’re all fighting for that next promotion. It’s hard not to constantly feel in competition with the world around you. These milestones in our lives are often framed in the context of others. It’s not, “I need to be the best.” Instead, we are taught we must beat everyone else to be the best. We’re led to believe the competition is not only a good thing, but necessary to motivate us to be our best. We are taught that excellence can only be achieved through winning.
The sad part is when our only focus is on the win, we lose the joy of the moments in life for what they are. Alfie Kohn, an experienced researcher of human behavior, put it best: “The point isn’t to paint or read or design a science experiment, but to win. The act of painting, reading, or designing is thereby devalued in [our] mind.” How often we trade the joy of living for various trophies and titles, and then wonder why, when surrounded by all these badges of success, we feel unhappy. You might be asking yourself, “How do I step out of the ‘game’ when everything around me feels like it’s created to drive competition?”
Changing the way we think about comparison and competition is hard, but not impossible. The first step is to recognize and acknowledge how you currently measure your personal success against others. The big ways we create competition are easy to recognize because they usually center around potential life milestones. For example, weddings, having kids, and advancing at work always seem to involve a ton of competition. You can’t just get married, you have to have the perfect wedding with the best band and the perfect dress. Your kids need
