There’s an old concept deceitfully trying to renew itself: competition.
While President Barack Obama brought it up as a key topic of his State of the Union address and economists around the world have orgasms just hearing the word, it saddens me to see Americans have in their core principles the need to beat someone or something else to feel successful.
Relax, my friends. You don’t need to get there first. Take a deep breath and start considering the absurd idea that you don’t have to be better than anyone to be happy. I’m doing the same here.
I understand the idea of competition in a game or in sports. I enjoy and admire it. It’s what a game is about, and that’s also why in sports there are lots of rules. And for the audience, the ones doing the cheering, the rule is to be entertained and have fun.
But there’s a subtle line that should be acknowledged when we go out to run the race of our daily lives: The only opponents are ourselves.
I know it’s hard to believe we don’t need to compete — the fact that you are enrolled in this University implies that you not only had to get a spot based on your better grades, but the main objective for all this is to make you “competitive in the job market.”
Well, the world is changing, and I don’t think this line of thought is what’s going to help build stable and healthy communities around a troubled globe. Replacing competition by collaboration would be much more effective and healthy.
Call me cheesy, but in this time of crisis we should be working together — not against each other — no matter what Obama says.
What I know from competition is the embedded, hard-to-fight notion that as a musician, I would only make it if I could play my cello better than my colleagues. It’s hard to make your résumé count if you haven’t won a competition. And in the best case, if you have, it will only prove that on the day of the contest you technically achieved a better performance in front of a panel of subjective judges.
Bull. If you already called me cheesy, get ready to call me naïve. There’s place for everybody in this jungle, especially if you work hard and respect others.
Concerning competition in the economy, I suspect the president is sending a message to quiet those who claim he’s anti-business. He even renamed the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board to the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. China’s surging economy is getting on the nerves of a country that carries the stigma of having to be the best, the richest.
However, according to economy guru Paul Krugman, it’s a mistake to blame the crisis on the lack of competitiveness, or talk about competitiveness as being an ultimate goal. It’s the myth that savage competition between big corporations builds a better market for America.
I take those pearls of economic advice a step further, or better, a step back, and warn you, my fellow students. Living with the obsessive idea that you will have to overcome your peers with the skills and activities that should put you side by side in the job market, and ultimately in life, is not only going to make you miserable — it’s going to make you sick.
If the disproportionate amount of tasks you already have in three weeks of class haven’t already made you sick, the paranoia of doing all of that because you have to succeed in spite of others will.
Give up the restlessness syndrome.
Relax, America, relax.
 
Marcelo Vieira is a 33-year-old jazz cello graduate student from Brazil. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_MVieira.
 
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Contact Marcelo Vieira at [email protected]