A World Obsessed With Winning

This world is obsessed with the idea of winning. Anything and everything has to be about the advancement of self-interest, more often than not in a competition against others of the same goal. It may be for survival, for a job, for a relationship. It's all about winning. If in any way you give the chance to the opponent an opening to win, then you've already lost. And the heavy indoctrination we've all grown up with with the obsession of winning, a loss will forever be a scar that will mark you as a loser, a quitter, an object of shame and for ridicule.

This morning when I woke up and as per the usual found myself musing about the different things in life, from something as mundane as a candy wrapper to something as profound as the meaning of life itself, it was then that it hit me - is it really all about winning?

I have been through so many challenges in life. And while I could proudly(?) say that for the most part I've won, there were also a few instances when I knew I just have to quit and accept a loss.

For years, these losses have bugged me to the point of psychologically and emotionally paralyzing myself that there's just no way I could get out of the rut these losses have put me into. It's always that annoying poem - Don't Quit - that keeps nagging me in my head whenever I think about the things that I had to give up. In a world so obsessed with winning and success, if one can still push himself past his limit, then by all means keep pushing. If you don't, then you've quit and lost.

And then I realized, is quitting really that bad? Is winning really everything, that a person could never ever advance himself once he decided to quit? It was then when my nonconformist mind answered a resounding: Hell, no!

No, it isn't always about winning. The idea of winning or losing is nothing more than just a vague idea created by mankind to measure things that he shouldn't even measure. Who will reach his destination the fastest - Does it matter if the purpose really is to just reach the destination? Who will have the most expensive badass car - Will it matter if all you really need is a convenient way to travel? Who will have the most gorgeous trophy wife - Will it matter if all one truly needs is someone to love and to be loved in return?

And so I thought: to quit, to accept a loss, is never always a bad thing. Even the best generals have to tell his soldiers to retreat. Even the best minds have to give up on an academic pursuit if the end result wouldn't be beneficial to the world. Life is full of challenges. And while we are all doing our best to win the most of them, there will always be some, if not a few, which we cannot and will never win.

I will never say that one has to quit and give up at every presented opportunity. But if one quits because he has to, because he has reached his limit, then there should be no shame in quitting. The bigger shame is in not even trying, by thinking that by avoiding a loss, one has already won.

~C McP

Photo from yamabushi.us