Boys are trained from the beginning to compete.
Media tropes convince us that to compete is human. But is it human to always compete? While competition can certainly drive us to do better and yada yada, I don’t think that we are race horses or that better performance is our end goal.
This philosophy of always striving for betterment, the 1% better every day pipe dream seems majority harmful and rarely useful.
Our ideas and philosophies don’t exist alone and we don’t act in silos. They intersect and intermingle with other ideas. So while this idea of 1% better every day seems innocuous independently, it very quickly devolves into a ’hustle culture’ phenomenon in our current modern world. It robs us of the ability to be present as every day becomes another opportunity to compete. The hustle culture is neither fun nor safe, and boys are at the forefront of this toxic flamethrower.
So many cultures train boys for relentless competition. I can’t speak for others but middle class India has its own special version of this hell, in which you burn them to the ground first, admonish them next and later leave them to themselves to recover. What is a man in middle class India unless he is ambitious and pursuing economic leadership?
This endless waste of an ideology is exhausting and suffocating. Boys are growing up clueless under the facade of competition. They have little idea of a self outside of an economic engine. Worse, they are given no time and space to cultivate oneself. They are not ambition machines here on earth only to constantly perform and outcompete others.