How to overcome ego or competitiveness
Everything pushes us to confront each other. The school is the place of the greatest battles of the ego. It educates children to seek excellence through competition. This training causes stress and disappointment. You don’t know if you should live your whole life like this, because competition never stops, from the cradle to the grave, everything is ultimately a game of comparison. How then can we approach life outside the prism of competition?
Doing what we love is not given to everyone. However, we all have a chance to choose our own path. When we do something we love, competition magically loses its interest. The thirst for victory is often only linked to a compensation for the burden of a job we don’t like. Closing our eyes to what we love means opening our hearts to the fears of existence. When we seek only to win, we forget that the beauty of life lies in a disinterested relationship with the world. The domination of others is only a flight forward most of the time. It is only a sign of an inability to find real meaning in one’s existence. Life should not be approached only from the perspective of conflict.
Wanting to be the best version of oneself is commendable, but wanting to crush others at all costs is questionable and even disturbing. You can choose a career path that you like without having to become a gladiator. In the long run, there are more benefits to seeking harmony with others and personal excellence than clinging to the illusion of victory over one’s contemporaries.
Finally, to adhere to this ideology of conflict is only a sign of our gregarious nature: we have given in to rules of the game that have been imposed on us without resisting the natural human tendency (especially very observable in children) to share and conciliate.
Let us not be the victims of a dominant thought that tries to crush us by pushing us into opposition with our brothers in humanity. By clinging too strongly to our identities (of culture, gender, nation, etc.) we become easily manipulated, which is why it is more than necessary to detach ourselves from such representations. In this way, we can cultivate benevolence towards our neighbor. We will have been able to go beyond masks and appearances to connect with our deeper nature of goodness.
