Who are you competing against?

November 16th, 2021

This is a part of my series on becoming on adult. Part 1: Who am I competing against?

I’ve reached that stage in life, where I am starting to have common stressing thoughts that would fall under the widely recognized “quarter-life crisis”. As I have various thoughts on various subjects including work, relationships, money, future, and etc, I thought it would be smart to organize these thoughts to vent my stress about them. This first piece is dedicated my worldview about competition.

These days it is common hear things along that you’re competing against yourself not the world, or some other variations such as today’s you should be the better version of yesterday’s yourself. I genuinely thought this as well throughout most of life so far, but I’m realizing that this may be bullshit. The competition is not against myself, friends, colleagues, billionaires, or whoever. My competition is against time. Most people would not describe me as an impatient person, rather they’d think that I’m quite patient and slow-to-react type. The slow-to-react bit is true, and I won’t even try to deny it given my terrible athletic skills. 🙂 However about the former, I am personally of the thought I’m quite impatient. This is not in the sense that I can’t wait for couple minutes for things. This is on the scale of years. I want to speedrun every goal I have and will have. I like being the young one in the group despite my aged looks. The looks help me to learn things from older people faster and won’t be hindered by the common idiotic mistakes I’d make along with my same age group.

I’d like to think of it as I’m competing my parallel universes’ future. The sensation that I have been given too much in life and must utilize it well to prove myself. The unnerving anxiety of whether my goals are unrealistic and ridiculous as many people told me. As much as I exude an aura of confidence, there is a part of me that fears failure. This is unhealthy yet I cannot think of the next best alternative. I know that most of things in world are on a spectrum and you have a wide range of options to pick from rather than the extremes. Perhaps, I am just not smart enough to pick the optimal route that would both provide me with happiness and materialistic rewards.

To think of this in a different manner, life is a time-limited tradeoff game where you have to balance happiness and achievements. This game would be much easier with unlimited time, which begs a different question: If you get infinite chances, is the game actually valuable? I am not sure where I heard this, but that death is a biggest gift of life. I still ponder at times about how long I’d live and hate the idea of aging accompanied by increasing responsibilities. I am competing against my life to make my mark before I die. To say this differently, I am competing every day to beat everyone and time. I am not competing against just my age group. I am not against my colleagues. I have greater visions to accomplish. I am competing against now. Who’s your competition?