It occurred to me today that I may have diagnosed a national disease.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed or not, but in America, we seem to compete over pretty much everything.

–>I’ve actually witnessed heated arguments between people about whether Coke is better than Pepsi.

–>There are people who competitively eat hot dogs.

–>Let’s not even talk about the way that people worry about their place in a line.

–>Ever heard of road rage?!?! I’ve had people almost run me off the road, to beat me to the next stop light?!?!

–>Eat ten of our wings with the ‘mind-bending death’ sauce and get your name on the Wall of Fame!

–>Two words for you –> Las Vegas

We just seem, as Americans (maybe as humans), to like to compete.

If you think I’m wrong on this, scroll through the feed on your favorite social media platform, checking for posts and then argumentative comments on those posts; if you can’t find any, you win the cash prize! Argument is one of our favorite ways to compete.

“I know more than you and I’ll prove it by arguing better than you.”

But…

One of the big problems that all of this competition creates is that it eats away at our ability to be cooperative as fellows. Can you imagine working on a team with that guy who just cut you off on the highway? Can you imagine working on a team with the guy who cost you $200 because he missed a field goal in an NFL game last month? Our deep-seated desires, to be ahead of as many people as possible, create an adversarial nature in us that is, I think, counter-productive to the continuance of our society, IMHO.

As a nation of competitors, I think we are finding it harder and harder to be teammates.

* * *

Yesterday, I wrote about playing soccer as a kid. When I did, I don’t ever remember my parents, as spectators at those events, as part of any equation that resulted in inappropriate conduct, on their part. Quite to the contrary, I remember one time very vividly, when I decided to call one of my opponents a name that I’d learned in a PG-13 movie, and I got red-carded out of the game. My father was NONE TOO PLEASED.

If Bill Carson is still out there, I’m sorry about my potty mouth on that day.

But, I’m sure you’ve seen THOSE parents, as spectators –or maybe even as coaches, perish the thought– who just don’t seem to understand that it’s just a game, when their six-year-old doesn’t score five goals in every ice hockey match, and they come down on them like a ton of bricks.

THESE PEOPLE LITERALLY BECOME UNGLUED!

Now, don’t get me wrong; I have no idea what it takes to raise a world-class athlete, but I can tell you that, if yelling at and berating your kid resulted in them becoming a world class athlete, we would need to have two NFLs and three NBAs, because there wouldn’t be enough places for all of the world-class athletes to play.

Just some more examples of competition being used for iniquitous purposes.

* * *

There’s no doubt that I wrote, just a couple of days ago, a post about how important daring goal setting is and how America’s goal to get to the moon was a great time for our nation, as we strove for the stars. Of course, I also wrote about how that goal was born, at least somewhat, out of a competition with the Soviet Union. So, needless to say, competition can serve important purposes.

The problem is, as I’ve tried to illustrate, that people cross a line.

As to how we should conduct ourselves when we –or our proxies or our progeny– are involved in competition, I would like to think that everyone knows where the line is, or they feel the line inside themselves. Now, since we have plenty of examples of people –or of ourselves– crossing those lines, heading into acts of inappropriateness, we might be tempted to think that there are people who don’t know where the line is, or who might be unaware that a line even exists.

I don’t believe that to be true, simply because I can’t think of a time when I’ve done something wrong when I didn’t know, in advance, that it was wrong. Maybe, I have my mom and dad to thank for that.

I would just like to think that everyone knows that there is a line and that they all –we all– know where it is.

I do, however, also believe that there are people who have crossed lines in their mind so many times, that they stop recognizing that there is a line there at all.

* * *

A friend of mine, yesterday, commenting on the first part of this two-parter, helped me to realize that competition is mostly an extrinsic motivator. As such, it’s not as necessary as people would like to make you think that it is, at least when it comes to motivating people to get better. The best type of motivators are the intrinsic ones, since they are not subject to changes in the world around us.

I mean, I could become obsessive over my 5K time, because I want to beat the guy in my office who runs a 5K in less than twenty-eight minutes, or…

I could decide that I want to beat my best-ever 5K time, to be the ‘best me’ that I can be.

When I decide that I am only going to compete with myself, then the existence of an external ‘competitor’ is of no consequence.

But what about an offensive lineman on a pro football team? Isn’t his improvement necessarily tied to the competition that he has on the football field, against the defensive backs in the league? Not necessarily. He could, instead, focus on being the best that he could be, in the weight room perhaps, rather than worrying about how he’s able to stack up against others.

When we hold ourselves up against other people, to compare ourselves to them and to what they are able to do, isn’t that, in and of itself, a form of competition? The guy down the street from me doesn’t know it, but I have always been jealous of the fact that he lost eighty pounds by picking up a regular running routine, so I have been chasing him, unbeknownst to him, ever since.

Competition.

* * *

I’m not sure what to tell you; in my estimation, especially in the light of the perversions that currently exist which cause competition to deviate from what was once a form of pure contest, I suspect that, these days, competition does more harm than good.

Leave it to our modern society to take something that is pretty decent, in its natural form, and then we stretch it out to the Nth degree, until we end up with something, so marred beyond recognition, that we wonder why we would have been interested in it in the first place.

I didn’t even take time to talk about our society’s obsession with being distracted by these competitions –not directly, anyway– but, between our level of distraction by competitions, and the extent to which competition has been bastardized to serve other purposes, I’ve had too much of it, as it is.

So, does anyone know what time the football game is this weekend?