Me vs Competition

When I was a young teenager, twelve-thirteen-fourteen, I played fairly high-level softball. I enjoyed the challenge of trying to hit sixty-mile-an-hour pitches. I enjoyed practicing and playing constantly with my teammates and the bonds that naturally arose. I enjoyed figuring out the optimal play, the optimal position.

I did not enjoy winning. I did not enjoy losing. And those were the only two options. When we won and knocked a team out of a tournament I’d see disappointment and tears on the other teams’ faces and feel sick to my stomach.

Now I play in the MIT league, which has no walks or strikeouts, where you give the other team some players if they’re short. This is how not-competitive the league is: once I pitched for another team who didn’t have enough players. They ordered pizza in the middle of the game, and walked out onto the field with gloves on one hand and slices in the other. “Do you want me to wait to pitch until you’re done?” I asked. They shook their heads and told me to go ahead.

We played that team again yesterday. At one point, they were up by ten runs. By the end, they were down by twelve. At no point did anyone really care.

This is my favorite team I’ve ever played on.

*

There are a lot of critiques to make about hackathons. They’re too developer-focused. They don’t address real needs. The projects created are often abandoned at the end of the weekend.

Those are reasonable critiques. But the one that bothers me the most is: they’re too competitive.

I had a lot of fun at the PyCon sprints. They were like hackathons in many ways - a bunch of developers sitting around tables working on projects for three days straight. But there were no “winners”, no prizes, and no two teams working separately on the same problem. If you had similar goals, you worked together and helped each other.

I’ve participated in exactly one non-civic hackathon. I drank some beer, met some people, and worked with a friend of mine on a small project that had nothing to do with the theme of the event. I don’t think anyone was particularly motivated by the prizes, but the organizers kept talking about them.

I left at about ten a.m. the next morning, right before the judging started.

*

I understand, intellectually, that competition can be a good thing. That for some people, it’s an incredible motivator - that it drives production and innovation and creativity.

Competition is the pulsing heart of capitalism - real capitalism, not the world of regulatory capture and corporate oligarchy we now inhabit - and yeah, I’m not the biggest cheerleader for any kind of capitalism, but I do see its value. I do think competition can be a healthy part of society.

But it can warp and corrode. In a competition, there must be a set of “win conditions” and those conditions are often different from the true goals of the competitors.

The goal of improving collective knowledge becomes the win condition of publishing papers in prestigious journals, and you get papers filled with errors, a research literature no one quite trusts.

The goal of tackling social problems and improving society becomes the win condition of securing funding, and you get activists focusing more on the needs of donors than the needs of their communities.

The goal of governing wisely and well becomes the win condition of amassing enough money to outspend your opponents, and you get politicians beholden to the rich.

I’m not saying we ought get rid of competition in these circumstances. Perhaps it’s enough to re-evaluate the win conditions, to re-align them with our goals. I don’t want to discount dynamics that have worked in major ways, just because the thought of participating in these systems - taking the spot of another promising researcher in a graduate school program, using funds that could have gone to another project or non-profit, defeating someone who sincerely wanted to serve their country - makes my heart ache.

But it’s at least worth considering that none of these things have to be a competition.

*

To compete is to possibly lose. To potentially fail.

My dislike of competition is more than just aversion to beating others. It’s also a fear of failure. I’ll admit to that.

So I admire competitors. I admire their bravery, their vulnerability.

But there is a bravery and vulnerability in cooperating, too. In working with others to find critique constructively, to find compromises. In trusting that others are committed to your shared project. In acquiescing to someone else’s choices, someone else’s vision, and hoping that they’re right, that your work won’t come tumbling down around you. You can definitely fail when cooperating.

But when you fail, you fail together. And when you succeed, you succeed together. You don’t have to shut off your empathy in order to enjoy your successes.

That’s how I want to work, to play, to live. Never shutting off my empathy. It’s hard, because competition is so much of our culture, so rooted in our heritage, our biology. But so is cooperation. And that’s the part that I choose to embrace.