Competition. No matter where you go or what you do, there’s no avoiding it. From the good old school days to now there has always been some situation that pits people against one another. Being the star of the play for your school annual day, becoming a council member in college, getting a promotion at work, there’s always been something that pushed you to want to outdo the other. The thing about it is that there’s no end, you win one, you seek another because no one simply gets to stay on top. 

There was a time when you could pick those few things that you truly wanted to hone and so you had space to relax. But the evolution of social media changed the game for all of us. What once was a platform that allowed us to share our passions and opinions with the world became a filtered reality as each of us tried to one-up the other. It became a space that allowed us to share only the best bits of our life or the aesthetically pleasing ones at least. 

Despite knowing that social media isn’t an accurate representation of anyone’s life, our competitive side rears its head to remind us that others are living a life better than us. You just got a new job? Well, your old classmate just started their own company. There’s always someone out there you can’t help but compare yourself to and involuntarily devalue your own successes. To prove that you’re still in the game, you keep posting about your every accomplishment but to what end? You decide to start working out. Your followers need to know. Now that you posted about it you can relax for a bit. You get to ride that high until someone posts about their one-year fitness journey and then it’s time for you to do something else that’s post-worthy.

Friendly competition can be a great source of motivation but it ceases to be positive when your self-perception is reliant on others regarding you as successful. With this your wins stop being your wins, it’s not a trophy you get to keep but a crown that can be passed on to the next unless you stay on your A-game and social media, of course, does its duty to keep reinforcing this notion. 

The cycle almost seems endless, but it’s not entirely our fault because this was bound to happen. As a society, we are so driven by the need to be on top that it trickles down into every aspect of our lives. It’s ingrained in us at such an early age in the smallest of ways like when your parents used to compare your grades to your siblings or when you were asked who your role model is. We’re all in this unending marathon and every time we finish a lap, the finish line moves further away. We’re constantly pushing ourselves to achieve our next level of success and if we’re not, we’re either feeling bad about it or whispering to ourselves that we don’t care, hoping we eventually believe it. 

We can’t afford ourselves the time to stop and relax or even enjoy our own successes. On and on we go, accomplishing one thing after another, wearing ourselves down, unable to savour the fruit of our own labour because we’re too busy looking into the next yard. Maybe it’s time to recognise that the grass is pretty green on this side and when it’s not that’s okay cause autumn is pretty great too.