Competition & Loss
Competition & Loss
I’m not sure exactly how this post will shape up. It’s based on a dream that I can’t really remember anymore. I get some very vivid dreams just before waking. They feel so real and, sometimes, compelling in their philosophical vision and coherence, just before they flee from the jaws of my cognition. This particular dream left me with a kernel of this, the fleeting taste of a much more comprehensive and vivid sense, and one that I intuit to be true. It’s a sensibility that saturates my thinking and my leadership coaching work. The kernel is this…
“For just one moment it would be nice to be unhaunted by competition and loss.”
For we humans, that’s the whole game in a very important way. Competition and loss. Our motivation is a constant effort to avoid both of these, even though we know they are both inevitable for ourselves and those we love, and there is no difference between ourselves and those we love, for we are and have nothing without them (“There is no (SELF)”), and since everyone loves and is loved by someone, we are all one, all unified by our collective humanity.
Do you see it? In every moment we are haunted by the tragic yet invigorating truth of these two forces upon our lives.
Competiton & Loss
And we’re not human without them, which means we find an absurd reliance on them, though we despise their fruits in many ways.
Competition & Loss
The forces we love to hate, and hate to love. The forces that drive all we do.
This all comes down to the human condition, and the fact that we are required to exist in each moment, each with its own new experience. What motives us? Simple. We want to maximize the goodness of the energy we experience in each moment. How do we do that? Seek to fill each moment with what we love. And that is many things. Everyone answers that question differently. It’s the question of meaning, BTW. But along with meaning comes a threat. The threat of loss. Whatever we love, whatever is meaningful to us, can go away. And this breaks our souls. In order to love and find meaning, we need to face loss. All that we love will leave us, or vice versa, eventually. We face loss in every moment.
Further, maximizing love and meaning is demanding. It requires power and freedom. And therefore everyone wants more power and freedom, and is trying to get it. Do you know what happens when multiple people seek power and freedom in the same space? Yep, competition - it is also inevitable. The world constantly threatens to pull our attention away from where we wish to direct it. And all the other people place demands upon us. Also, if you want something, it is inevitable that others want it too. If they didn’t we wouldn’t find it valuable. Competition comes from the demands of nature, the demands of society, and the demands of the mythical narratives that forge us into the leaders of noble character that we perpetually become. Like loss, it too, is unavoidable. If it’s worth having, it is likely scarce and hard-won.
My dream was correct. Just once I would like to experience a moment unhaunted by competition and loss. But it isn’t possible. It can’t be. All that makes the human condition valuable and worthwhile is haunted by competition and loss. It has always been and must always be.
Meditate on this and you will cherish that which you love all the more deeply, and also value the friction of competition and how it refines you all the more as well.
My dream was also nonsensical. It’s not actually what we want. But it, like so many other facets of the human experience, is a paradoxical IDEAL. In each moment we are haunted by loss and competition, the very forces that make human life worth living.