The Competition Trap - Essay No. 5
I have spent a long time thinking about competition as a concept, and I am still not entirely sure whether the competition trap deserves a chapter of its own or whether it sits so close to the performance trap and the struggle trap that they are, in truth, different expressions of the same underlying dynamic. At the same time, that may be precisely why I want to linger here for a moment, because competition is one of the most self-evident ideas we live with, and for that very reason it is rarely questioned. We participate, we watch, we compare, we measure, without stopping to ask the more fundamental question of what competition actually is, and why it exerts such a powerful pull. Competition does not stop at arenas or scoreboards. It continues into everyday life. Who has the biggest grill. The most expensive car. The largest house. More trips. A bigger ring. Higher status. More. More. More.
In my view, competition is a concept that does not really work. The moment people have different conditions, competition becomes inherently unfair, even though fairness itself is another trap that belongs in a different essay, and it might be more accurate to say that competition becomes unusable. No matter how one turns it, different bodies, different psyches, different backgrounds, different daily forms and different lives are being placed side by side. If the conditions are never the same, what is it that is actually being won. One can say that someone is faster, stronger, more enduring, better trained or more mentally focused, and people love to watch that, love the drama and the story of winners and losers, but the victory becomes strangely uninteresting once you scratch beneath the surface.
What I find myself returning to instead is why we want to win at all. Why there is such a strong drive to be the best, the fastest, the highest, the furthest, the most. Because competition almost always moves in the same direction. More speed. More strength. More money. More status. More. Very rarely do we compete in the opposite direction. There is no slowest Formula 1. No contest for being the smallest, the slowest, the most still. That kind of competition draws no audience. It does not interest us, and that says something about human beings and our relationship to value.
For me, competition has always felt like a peculiar spectacle. I can absolutely be fascinated by it, find athletics beautiful to watch, Formula 1 thrilling, and be drawn to the way people push their limits. At the same time, I often find myself standing on the side wondering whether competition is even possible. For competition to be meaningful, the conditions would have to be exactly the same, and they never are, especially not when it is human beings competing, not machines or robots built from the same blueprint.
This became particularly clear to me when I competed in marathons myself. It was striking how much attention was given to times, rankings and comparisons, and how little was said about the experience, the courses, the weather, the body, or the life surrounding the race. Times from different years were compared as if it were the same race, the same body, the same conditions, even though it never was. Different shoes. Different stress levels. Different sleep. Different nervous systems. And still the comparisons continued, along with the valuation of one’s own worth, and the worth of others. The fastest runner or the highest earner is assigned a higher value.
This is where the competition trap becomes painful, because it is rarely just about the competition itself. It becomes an identity trap. The result of that day, in that body, under those conditions, starts to say something about who you are. I have seen this countless times in sports, people who are completely crushed when a competition goes badly, as if their entire worth rose and fell with that one performance. And then come the explanations, often desperate attempts to protect self-esteem from having to admit that it was a bad day, or that this is simply how good it was this time.
The paradox is that training to become truly good means, in practice, failing more often than succeeding. That is the process. Development happens through all the attempts that do not turn out the way one hoped. Yet we speak very little about that, and so it becomes disheartening for anyone who measures their worth by results. One day the time is slower than the week before, and judgment arrives immediately, harsh, automatic and self-accusing. The body did exactly what it could that day, under those conditions, but the mind holds a different image of what should have been. That is where the misalignment arises. The mind becomes the judge that strikes down the very thing we are meant to care for, and the body feels it. The body responds, rarely with better performance, but more often with resistance, fatigue or pain.
This is not limited to sports. It spills over into work, relationships, studies, business, presentations and grades. Well-being becomes tied to performance. The competition trap and the performance trap walk hand in hand, sometimes so closely that they are difficult to distinguish. Performance in itself is not the problem. Competition in itself is not the problem. It is the charge, the pressure, the need to show, to prove, to be enough. It lives in self-worth. I want to be good, to be competent, in the eyes of others and in my own, because otherwise I experience myself as having less value.
Living under constant pressure to perform and compete wears down the nervous system, both physiologically and mentally. Often there is no real balance between effort and recovery, and one drives oneself relentlessly. The harder one is on oneself, the harsher one tends to be on others, often through judgment. Those who are hard on themselves frequently become hard on their surroundings. Demands, stress and dissatisfaction spread, and people begin to feel that they never measure up, that they are only worthy when they deliver. Many recognize this from school, from their parents, from workplaces where managers demand more, or from relationships where one is judged for not being good enough as one is.
This is where we begin to approach the root. In the end, competition almost always lands in the same question. Is this about curiosity, desire and exploration, or is it about being enough. About proving that you can. About becoming someone. About being worth something.
I have competed myself, but never for times or placements. I competed for the experience, out of curiosity about what was possible. My interest was never in beating someone else, not even myself, and perhaps that is why the concept of competition has always rubbed me the wrong way. Because how many people actually stop and look honestly at their own competitiveness and performance anxiety. At whether the drive comes from curiosity or fear, from joy or lack, from self-trust or from a sense of not being enough. This is where it becomes uncomfortable, because the truth is not always flattering. Some people, like my son, love competition. He has a genuine drive in it, and I never experience him doing it to prove something to others, perhaps only to himself. He simply does not give up, and in his case it feels less like competition and more like an expression of energy that wants to move and flow.
But if we turn it around and look at those who do not want to compete, who feel discomfort, withdraw and become anxious, what is that about. Perhaps it is also an expression of not being enough, of fear of doing something wrong, of being judged for not delivering. That is the performance trap, an anxiety rooted in the fear of not measuring up. That is another trap, for another day.
Ultimately, the competition trap emerges the moment one begins to win over others in order to feel good about oneself. Because when your joy depends on someone else losing, when your self-worth grows at another person’s expense, you have stepped straight into the trap. And as long as your happiness relies on the failures of others, it is also a sign of your own inner failure.