Weeks ago, an Instagram ad sprung from the depths of the algorithm’s abyss splashed an invitation across my mobile screen, one for a writing competition. No theme, no holds barred, it urged its writers to be creative. It was a welcome change from all the underwear ads I had been receiving. The competition had a registration fee. I checked if it was authentic, if my money was going to vacuum into nothingness. It seemed genuine.

I was going through a dry spell creatively. I had applied myself to the competition but I was struggling to apply myself. I had been documenting my life in my journal but nothing emerged warranting the transformation of an inward reflection into an outward essay. I spent a few days reading my old pieces that I had written for this blog. All I could find were faults. Some of them had comments encouraging my writing. I was not convinced. I settled on three pieces, edited to fit the competition guidelines. There was a possibility to rank in 13 places (Top 3 and 10 Bonus awards). I ranked nowhere.

That I had tried for a competition and failed was no earth shattering development. It was what school had prepared me for. For as many categories of competitions existed during my schooling years, I had gone and lost and gone and lost. I was always welcomed home with a buoyant spirit. That, among other things, had kept my competitive temperament alive. This loss, in a writing competition where I had recycled old creativity in the hope that it ought to be enough, stirred something in me that had lain dormant for years. A pebble had rippled onto placid waters. I recalled my barely contained competitiveness. Not the destructive kind, one where anything was fair game, but one where I itched to edge an inch or two over others.

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I had a classmate who, one year, documented the scores of the Top 10 kids in the class. It was a meticulously maintained notebook. Looking back, it seemed like an obvious strategy if you wanted to compete – know your competitors. But the notebook was a source of amusement primarily because it had been painted black with a white skull with crisscross bones underneath. ‘Danger’ was inked in neat white script. Who or what was the danger? Was the possibility of featuring in it the danger? Or the ones within a danger to the creator of the notebook? How did it feel to be the 11th kid, having barely missed out on featuring in it?

We made fun of my classmate for putting effort into that notebook but some 15 odd years later, some of us work for companies that charge exorbitant fees from their clients for the same service, competitive benchmarking. Of course, these reports aren’t inked with ‘Danger’ but they might as well be. Perhaps my classmate missed a calling in life.

As far as my competitiveness was concerned, I may have bruised some of my classmates with it, and with a blind belief in my vision. When I was cleaning my inbox, I came across group assignments where I had ordered my teammates around, distributing tasks without any input, hijacking projects entirely and bending them to my single-minded pursuit of an A+. I was a dictator. It is a wonder they didn’t coup. 

In school, competing and winning was a social currency. If you were on stage with a certificate or a trophy, you were likely to be seen among your peers with respect. Even the resident prankster who mocked you was clapped for when the opportunity called. It was the code of honor. Now, having read enough Freud, we can throw a jab at those who annoy us, turning their accomplishment into a veil for their or our insecurity. Back then it was unthinkable. You could not deny them their achievement. 

Once college hit, I kept up with my competitive libido, applying and losing many a time, winning sporadically. Eventually, I hit a wall when I realized it was a disguise for the lack of direction I felt in my life. I went cold turkey. I started to question why I had been doing it. I morphed into the audience, the ones who stood and clapped, and when I looked on the stage, I didn’t always see a display of talent; I saw an appeal to be noticed and validated – “Tell me I matter”. It could be a case of sour grapes. Perhaps I saw it so, so that I was not tempted to partake in it anymore.

School and college are different ball games. Schools are led by a mythical spirit of meritocracy. Kids believe that they need to be good enough at what they do and it ought to be enough. And it mostly is. College trades meritocracy for cult of personality. The social currency is how many know you, and if you know the right people in return. Both, appearance, and appearances matter. 

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When I let go of the rein on my competitive hands, I realized I wasn’t chafed in return. I couldn’t care anymore to compete against my friends because college was such a vast field in which all of us buzzed around in Brownian motion. Everyone had their own race to run, and it turned out that there was space to run all of them in parallel. I invested my time in getting to know my friends as people. There were some that still clung to old ways, who saw someone’s rise as a threat, or perhaps, something less concerning but worth outdoing nevertheless. There was the odd time or two when I competed in something and won. It was a surprise but it no longer brought the high that it used to. Books started to take up more of my time. I spent months immersed in them, launching into lectures on what I had read to whomever would indulge me. I felt myself mellowing, softening. I no longer had any point to prove to anyone. 

During my Master’s degree, I relinquished competition like an ascetic. I was a salmon, swimming upstream. The ecosystem of any business school runs on the wheels of an intensified miasma of competition, forever ranking you against your peers. Putting people in their place, literally. From the grades to the competitions to the job opportunities, it seems as though you are expected to keep your elbows sharpened at all times, ready to push others behind. While I admired my friends there and often pitched in with ideas for the competitive presentations they prepared, I did step away. I realized I couldn’t escape the system but I could wedge myself into nooks where it didn’t bother me. I went on walks, listened to podcasts, turned to my thoughts, and read whatever I could lay my hands on. I took courses just because their outlines felt interesting, I didn’t sit for companies whose work conditions were suspicious. I cultivated an inner space that fortified itself in my months there. I entered a delayed rebellious phase where if it didn’t make sense to me, I wouldn’t do it. I learnt to say No without adding a trailing clause.

I realized that when people wear a coat of goodness as a badge, it’s not enough that they think of themselves as good. They demand to be seen as such by others too. 

When my job started, especially in a post-Covid world where we were all forced to sit with legs crossed, our lives in front of us like toys on a shelf, and we were told we could only pick what was most important, I had hoped that things would change. Yet, I found myself facing similar people. Days ago, on a work call, a discussion on the status of environment friendly initiatives led to polite competitive declarations on who had done more and by how much. It might have been phrased in cordial sentences but it was hard to hear it as anything but bragging. I realized that when people wear a coat of goodness as a badge, it’s not enough that they think of themselves as good. They demand to be seen as such by others too. 

It is hard to escape this competitive bubble when, even at work, and in life, you are reduced to, and mapped as a data point among other data points. A tiny dot in a quadrant of dots. You cannot listen to music without being informed what percentile of listeners you fall in. You cannot run without your phone telling you that you are not as fast today. You cannot even sleep without your phone counting the minutes and letting you know it was worse this week. I feel as though I live perennially marked with a white skull with criss-cross bones underneath, ‘Danger’ inked in neat white script. But who is keeping track of me now? How do I escape the metric of my existence without giving up the joy of that activity?

I speculate that when you decide something which is in contrast to those around you, people take your rejection of their path as a rejection of who they are themselves. 

Why are we all stuck in these competitive loops? Perhaps we are all reading from the same script. Or reading it the same way. We are hitting the same milestones without thinking if it is good for us to even have them in the first place. It is only natural to look around and decide if you’re doing better or worse than someone, depending on the day. But the idea of competition exists on the principle of comparison which necessitates the existence of another person, and a ladder on which there is space for only one of you at the same time. It is a struggle to extricate yourself from these patterns primarily because if you want to think deeper, truly think, you need to stop running, or at least slow your pace. But to stop running is to also imply a question to those who continue to run past you. I speculate that when you decide something which is in contrast to those around you, people take your rejection of their path as a rejection of who they are themselves. 

Perhaps we have been running since we were children, fueled by the expectations of our parents that were, in turn, fueled by theirs. We are all shouldering a Fibonacci series of generational expectations. Some of us haven’t learned that we can stop. It is impossible to exist as a true individual, colored as we are by brushes of culture, gender, tradition, and our upbringing; none of which can be truly undone. Yet, as Deborah Levy writes in two of her books-

In ‘The Cost of Living’: “To become the person someone else had imagined for us is not freedom – it is to mortgage our life to someone else’s fear. If we cannot at least imagine we are free, we are living a life that is wrong for us.”

And In ‘Real Estate’: “It seemed to me all over again that in every phase of living we do not have to conform to the way our life has been written for us, especially by those who are less imaginative than ourselves.”

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The questions, then, morph. Can we stand the disapproval of those around us without feeling diminished as individuals? Can a domestic space survive if those within have lives that do not follow neat lines? Can we be who we are meant to be within our homes?

One evening, in an auto ride, the driver asked me to advise him about some technical certifications he could nudge his son towards. His son was studying Computer Science in college and the father was concerned about his job prospects. I did not ask him if that was what his son wanted for himself. He asked me about the tenure of my job and disapprovingly shook his head before telling me that I ought to switch every 18 months to get salary jumps. I did not recite the Deborah Levy quotes back to him. I simply nodded and told him that he was right. 

The auto driver’s competitive drive emerged out of a parental desire to give his son a better life. I could not fault his sincere motive. But what if his son didn’t dream of this path to upward economic mobility? What if his son was content where he was? What if he was never asked what he wanted to do instead? Which burdens, generational or otherwise, lay hidden in the arch of the auto driver’s back?

I do not know what fuels the competitive spirit of most of the adults around me. I do not know if it will help me to know. Maybe I am missing out on something that they seem to be in on, a secret to wake up on the winning side of every morning. However, I am free to speculate on my own motivations. I wanted to win the writing contest because I wanted the jury to validate my writing. There is a subgenre of Instagram reels where people walk up to strangers and ask them to rate them out of 10. I wanted the literary equivalent. 

In the days following the declaration of the result of the writing competition, one prize holder was disqualified for using generative AI to submit their entry. Someone else was awarded their spot. The competition had called for creativity and I would argue, this was creative on the person’s part. What is originality anyway? 

My lectures in Microeconomics taught me that competition was good for the economy. It made things better for consumers. In fact, there were graphs that we could draw and figure out how much better it was than before. What did participating in the economy of this writing competition do for me? Was I better as a consequence?

It woke up something in me that had diminished over time. Perhaps my desire to be “discovered” by strangers was misguided but I realized I needed to keep writing. It brought me back here to this blog, to you, the reader, who is still a stranger to me. Perhaps my need for validation persists. This could have stayed in my journal. But it didn’t. When you turn parts of your life into essays for public consumption, it is a kind of exhibitionism. It’s another way to phrase, “Tell me I matter”. Perhaps an even more direct one. I do not know what to plot on a graph to answer if I am better off. My economics class would not have allowed for such ambiguity. This question, if unanswered in my MBA exam, would have pushed my grade back. I would have been put in my place. 

I am yet to receive feedback from the writing competition. There are some “unexpected technical challenges”. They understand the eagerness that accompanies [my] wait. [My] understanding, patience, and support during this time mean[s] the world to [them]. They express [their] profound gratitude. 

I wonder if their consolation email was the work of generative AI.

Meanwhile, I write.