On Competition

Quick Fact

-We normally engage in competition to feel good, however, we can obtain the same feelings by other, more effective means! 

Intro

Competition, as we very well know, is extremely popular in our modern society today. It comes in forms varying from sports to conversations to partners to wars, and it seems like we can’t get enough of it. Watching sports in America is so popular that it almost defines America, and of course almost every country values war, an extreme form of competition… So what gives?

You know, there’s a person in my life who is extremely hypercompetitive. He’s the most competitive person I’ve ever seen in real life or TV, and it’s ruining (or otherwise greatly inhibiting) his life on every possible dimension. I began to question the point and goal of competition before, but meeting this guy made me question it even more… Until I arrived at my stark conclusions! Let’s take a look at the nature of competition, shall we?

The Nature of Competition, What The Goal Is

So, we have two basketball teams trying to win a game. Why?

Part of this is simply a biological urge. Testosterone, to be exact – the higher your level of testosterone the more competitive you’re likely to be. 

I’m fairly certain that we developed this chemical because we faced a lot of threats in our primal years. It helped by giving us the “alpha” mindset, “I deserve to live and you don’t,” and this mindset combined with physical strength made it possible for us to kill enough oncoming threats to survive into the modern age. We probably developed serotonin and/or dopamine alongside testosterone because our bodies wanted us to feel good right after we defended our families, almost as a source of motivation!

So nowadays we have many men who know how it feels to “win,” to be the alpha, to be dominant over others. We enjoy feeling good, so we compete in sports and try to win because we know winning feels good. Or we try to dominate the conversation. Or we boss our partner around. Or… Well, it can be a number of things. Plus, we feel other endorphins while our body is moving, and these feel great as well.

Competition is a very primal, biological state of being with a simple goal – survive and feel good. Often we don’t even know why we compete, but so much of our country and our world is so obsessed with it because we want to feel the good stuff, and because we don’t understand better ways of obtaining said good stuff.

The Positives and The Negatives

The positives are:

-Competition (competing in sports, etc) makes us feel good through physical movement and teamwork

-Competition where there isn’t much physical movement still feels good via winning and teamwork 

-It’s easy and simple to initiate and carry out consistently.

-Almost everyone on the planet enjoys watching or participating in some form of competition, which means it’s a great way to relate to people.

And the negatives are:

-As it stands many of us are far too obsessed with it, some of us even going so far as to ignore our spouses and/or children to watch the game.

-it’s very very pushed in almost every single country in one form or another, we love to prioritize it over literally everything else. Consequently, many of us weren’t raised right and yearn for “the thing we can’t explain.” 

-The majority of us who are consumed by competitive spirits often stay there for life, and that life is often a low-vibrational and unfulfilling life.

In my opinion, the negatives are far too detrimental to be ignored! Some of us have a healthy view towards competition and we take it quite lightly, but it’s worth continuing for the same of those who are simply enraptured by the competitive spirit.

How To Reach The Goal In Better (More Effective) Ways

Feeling good and surviving isn’t very difficult! It especially doesn’t require us to be consumed by competitive spirits – a healthy balance between healthy competition and doing other things in life will often be the best way to reach our goal of “surviving and feeling good.”

I encourage you to ask yourself, “in which areas of my life do I want to take action? Where do I cut back and where do I move forward? And why, exactly?” Once you know exactly where and why you want to take action, taking the action itself will probably feel more meaningful overall.

There are other ways such as deep meditation. You can choose to feel good whenever you want, and I especially direct this next point to the militarily-minded among us – psychedelics. Ironically, the ones who make and enforce the law against psychedelics are the ones who need (and benefit from) them the most!

Don’t discount a healthy diet, a healthy social life, and a healthy relationship. Learning how to build the necessary skills to have these things will take some time but I 100% recommend that everybody do this as well as you/they possibly can.

Conclusion

In the end, being too obsessed with competition isn’t very healthy for you or anyone around you. If you’re already healthy and you enjoy watching the game then that’s fine! But there are always different (dare I say, better!) ways to achieve the goal that competition wishes to achieve, especially when it comes to war. Every soldier should meditate and take psychedelics, period! Then they’ll see how great their war really is!

Thank you for reading! I’ll see you in the next article 🙂