Competition

So much has changed since the time I started this blog - COVID was just coming up back then and I was working through a lot of different emotions as my startup imploded and Singapore went into lockdown. It’s almost pointless to try to list all of those things out. I’d rather reveal them over time as I keep posting on here without too much editing.

What hasn’t changed, frustratingly, is my attitude towards competition. I don’t want to compete with people. When I meet strangers, I don’t want to compete with them - after all, what did they ever do to me? When I look at my friends and family, I want them to succeed. I want the people around me to succeed even if it comes at some expense to me because I know it’ll return to me in some bigger way. This leaves no room for healthy competition in my life - because I leave no room for any competition in my life.

This starts to become a problem when I encounter zero-sum situations in life. A tennis game. A BJJ match. Haggling over price. I cede ground automatically because I’m afraid of confrontation. I can recall memories from middle school that help me contextualize some of this - Eric Szuhany stabbed my hand with a pencil when I kept winning too many rounds of Challenge 24. Gene and I were once playing a round of chess and had to suspend it because time was up. When we set up the board again the week after, we did it with a board rotated 90 degrees, which meant my bishop was in the wrong place. I knew that I was going to win before we suspended the game, but I lost afterwards and I wracked my mind trying to figure out what went wrong. Once I figured it out, I didn’t want to be petty about it because that was 8th grade. I had no friends and I wasn’t going to let a loss get in the way of a lifelong friendship.

The one verse of the Bhagavad Gita I keep returning to is centered around this same idea - that I have to fight and maybe “lose” connections. That I have to be nasty to win but will end up very alone as a result of it.

I’ve been weightlifting now for nearly a year - it’s very fun! There are a lot of competitive elements around it, but it’s all positive sum. If you compare with others, everyone gets stronger, and your ultimate competition is yourself, your own psychology and physiology. I have brought harmful Type A energy to this and injured myself as a result, but there was no one else involved there - except maybe a vague psychological mirage of a cosmic ‘enemy’ of mine I had to beat. A kind of amalgamation of everyone who has “done me wrong”.

There’s a solution to this - structured competition where I trust the fairness of the judges and rules. When I think of the examples in my life of competition, nearly all of them are ones where the rules are fuzzy and the referees are nonexistent. There was no one to check that the competition was run fairly, and therefore when rules were bent or broken there was no consequence. Competition, for me, means wrestling with my own moral code while wrestling with the person in front of me. Having a fair arbiter will take away the pressure of having to hold myself up to a standard and the rage from seeing that others don’t hold themselves up the same way.

In the past, I had defined my ‘antagonists’ by moral valence - and so competition was always wrapped up in ideas of my own goodness and the other person’s wickedness. I want a context free of such moral implications but with clarity of rules and a real chance of winning! “Out beyond ideas of good and bad, there is a field, let’s wrestle there” - Rumi, white belt.