At the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, controversy erupted over a running-shoe advertisement on local transit. Its tagline read, “You don’t win silver—you lose gold.” This implied a remarkable point of view. You might master your sport, rise to excellence, become one of the best in your country, be accepted to the Olympics, and perform to within a centimeter of the most accomplished athletes there. And that would make you a loser. A failure.
That copywriter should be your hero.
A competitive stance toward social interaction is a stunningly effective strategy for the production of misery. You and a hundred of your relatives, friends, or coworkers might work at a project or attend an event—but only one of you will rise to the top. The others will head home as failures. Most of the time, of course, you will be among them.
Sometimes it’s especially easy to turn an activity into a competition. You are on the squash ladder at your fitness center. You run a footrace. You strive for the “Employee of the Month” award. You fight to get the corner office. In all of these instances, it’s obvious who wins, and if there were more than two in the battle, it usually won’t be you.
In many social situations, however, the winner is less clear. Who comes away with the gold medal from a dinner party, a camping trip, a drive to the beach, a discussion about oil-development policy?
Here the best strategy is to take events in which there is no obvious rivalry and create one. Who can prepare the best dish, start a campfire with the fewest matches, get to the beach fastest, prove their point about oil? Compare your efforts to theirs, insist that you are right and they are wrong, and challenge them to a race or test.
This can be hard work. Most people aren’t wired to see everything as a win-or-lose game. After all, does knowing more about Ecuador really make you superior? Does humiliating your nephews at checkers gain their affection? If someone has a more discerning nose for wine, does this make her more sophisticated or does it just mean she drinks too much?
Getting people who raise questions like this to compete is like tossing a ball to a dog that just wants to go back to sleep. You may have to goad them to the starting line. One option is to imply that they fear competing with you or lack the requisite killer instinct (“C’mon, ya chicken!”). Another is to imply that they would lose anyway and that their reluctance to compete constitutes a loss before the race has begun (“You know I’m fastest”).
If they still won’t bite, compete anyway. Prove your point until they drift away. Run whether she follows or not. Argue until he stops phoning. The transitory sense of superiority that you achieve will ferment with the yeast of loneliness into a potent sense of unhappy futility. And if you do manage to entice them to compete and then lose to them, you can add your own humiliation to the mix.
Ensure that your compatriots do not view the competition as trivial, good natured, or fun:
True victory means they should see its significance—that you are the superior creature—and they should want to abandon the field to you.
Doesn’t this run the risk of happiness? In a field of lackadaisical contestants who would rather enjoy each other’s company than get in a test of one-upmanship, mightn’t you win and be triumphant? Only briefly. In 279 BCE, King Pyrrhus remarked after winning a costly skirmish, “If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined.”8 Similarly, any victory you achieve will be Pyrrhic—you will win the race but lose their respect, prove your point but be proven foolish.
Competition may nevertheless seem to be the path to triumphant happiness, so my casting it as a route to misery may seem suspect. Look carefully at the reflexively competitive individuals around you, however, and you will see a deeply driven nail of shame—partly the source of their competitive style, partly the result of it.
The real happiness-inducing prize is having a group of people who feel positively toward you, who include you on the invitation list, and who feel better because you were there. None of these goals are served by proving your imaginary superiority. You may be able to win the war, but the troops you conquer will be your own.
I once attempted to treat a man with a distinctly competitive approach to the world. To him, every encounter produced a winner and a loser. Even therapy. All of my attempts to put him in the driver’s seat, to support him in making changes he wanted to make, and to get on his side failed miserably. He saw our encounters as a battle between us and could not be persuaded otherwise. Knowing that my secret goal was for him to be contented in his life, he pulled the other way. And, given that his life was in his own hands all along, of course he won. And so can you.
Nature is red in tooth and claw. So should you be.