COMPETITION HARMS US ALL

The main enemy we’ve always faced has been ourselves. Since we’ve learned how to harness fire and cultivate the soil humanity has lived in a spot on the food chain that cannot be challenged. Unfortunately that meant that we had to look among ourselves for a new enemy. That competitive nature has made our lives harder than they ever needed to be. If we start actively and societally overcoming our base desire to win on an individual level and instead shift it to a base desire to win on a species-wide level everyone will begin to get happier and healthier.

We’ve been raised to view each other as enemies.

From the moment we’re born we’re compared to each other. Is it a boy or girl? How big is it? Questions like these are some of the first things others say about us. Then as we get older we’re placed into systems of competition to the point of winning being the only goal. Teamwork is only a platitude we see on posters of the walls of our third grade classrooms. Tests, rankings, and contests are what tell us the real story we’re supposed to pick up in our early years.

Beat everyone else. Come out on top.

We used to fight Communism.

During the Cold War we had a great enemy that we could all posture up against to defeat. The USSR was the perfect competitive enemy for us to rally behind. We had to beat them to the moon. We had to beat them in Olympic hockey. We needed a bigger military and more nuclear weapons.

It was perfect. We could keep our competitive upbringing and point it outward at an enemy that was actually invisible to most of us.

Now we fight each other.

Now the wall has been down for thirty years and we’ve found a new enemy; ourselves. Many of us keep that competitive edge we were raised with and simply view our peers as our competition. Many others of us have found someone even more internal to compete against: our actual selves.

We have no easily graspable existential threat like we did in the years after WWII. So we jumped to the easiest enemy to realize. Now the polarization of our culture has gotten to cutthroat that we’re actively cutting ties with those that have even one opposing view from us, and labeling them enemies.

How does this help our country?

Or, we’re so internally divided that we actively sabotage and attack ourselves through our internal (sometimes external) dialogue.

How does this help us?

Let’s shift our competitiveness to cooperation.

The energy we put into this stratification of our worldview seldom helps it. Even if you’re in direct competition with a similar company in cornering a specific niche of a market, how does it actually help you if you come out on top and thwart the other company?

I’ll argue it doesn’t.

It’s a struggle of greed for the glory and the dollar that leaves a trail of wreckage that will need to be cleaned up eventually.

If instead you choose to become cooperative with yourself and with your neighbor you’ll find that a rising tide lifts all boats.

Find where you have a competitive advantage in your sector and cooperate with your peers to find theirs so that you can make your industry that much better.

Find which parts of your personality have a certain knack for handling different types of situations and call on them when you’re in need. Even if a certain disposition like anxiety or depression seems completely useless, if you look well enough, you’ll find that the energy you store in those personalities have great application when prescribed intelligently.

If we are able to cooperate with each other and find what makes us similar instead of what makes us different, life is going to get a whole lot easier. The hardest part is acknowledging that this is something we need as a species.

No one else is going to start this shift. You have to do it. Start with yourself, then move to your loved ones, and slowly start to branch out to people that you are less trusting of.

If everyone went to an Ivy League School or got their Black Belt in Jiu-Jitsu the world would be a much better place, not worse. The only limited resources are the ones we withhold from each other.

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.