It's not my fault I want to beat you so bad.
Status, gossip, the origins of language, and embracing our competitive nature (sometimes).
My Strava account may be good for my physical health, but it may not be so good for my mental health.
For anyone who doesn’t know, Strava is a popular fitness tracking app. Primarily used for runners and cyclists, it lets you track individual workouts, compare your relative fitness and recovery over time, and plan out your next route.
But, of course, that’s not all Strava does. It’s also a social media app. After all, what app in 2023 isn’t a social media app in one way or another?
Strava lets you follow other runners, give them “kudos” (the app’s version of “likes”) and comment on their workouts.
This is all fine.
But Strava has another feature, known as Segments.
Basically, any user can choose a trail, a hill, or a stretch of road, and designate it as a Segment. They then give it a name, and the app will instantly populate a public leaderboard of every person who has ever tracked a run across that stretch of road, trail, or track. Whenever you complete a run, Strava will tell you in your workout report which segments you ran, and where your pace lands you on the all-time leaderboard.
When I first began running a few years ago, discovering Segments forced me confront something deep, dark, and unexpected about myself.
I’m a deeply competitive person.
It wasn’t long before I became obsessed with getting the number-one slot on a few segments near where I lived. Where that was impossible (it turns out there are a lot of people faster than me), I would randomly choose a person somewhere ahead of me on the leaderboard and commit myself to knocking them out of their spot in the top 10, top 20, etc.
It gets more embarrassing.
Because it wasn’t enough for me to use some arbitrary position on the leaderboard for motivation. I needed to make it personal.
But how do you find a personal reason to become competitive with a complete stranger who’s nothing more than a name on a virtual leaderboard for some obscure trail near your house?
Well, you stalk them.
I began picking names at random from the leaderboard and navigating to their Strava profiles. Most of them offered very little personal info.
But then I found a man in my area who appeared on several local Segment leaderboards, usually a few spots ahead of me. We’ll call him Doug. I discovered that Doug made one comment on one of his runs from months earlier that could have been construed as somewhat homophobic/transphobic.
That was all I needed.
I built Doug into this imaginary garbage person, reeking of intolerance and hate, running around the trails I loved with his terrible personality, spreading bad vibes. In my mind, I imagined that if I were to systematically knock Doug out of the top ten leaderboard of a few major Segments (a designation that gives you the hallowed trophy icon next to that Segment), I might be able to bring this P.O.S. down a peg.
Yes, I really thought all of this. For real.
How do you turn running in solitude in nature into something competitive? Well, you use an app to find/create an enemy you’ve never met and about whom you know virtually nothing.
Now that I can play on a local social basketball team again — something that the pandemic took from me, inspiring my first steps into running — I have a more natural place to embrace competition, so I don’t need to look for it on the trails.
But this all begs the question: why does beating someone have to be part of it for me? Why can’t I be the hippie, we’re-all-on-the-same-team self I desperately wish I could become? Why can’t I simply be inspired by other great writers, rather than knowing there’s this tiny, dark, disgusting part of me that reads their writing and thinks, I can do better than this. Why are they so successful? I could write them under the table?
Michael Jordan’s “I took it personal” refrain from the documentary on his career became an amazing meme. But is it an accident that one of the greatest competitors in sports history (and, let’s face it, kind of a jerk) went out of his way to imagine personal attacks and slights everywhere he went?
More generally: Why do we compete with each other?
Let’s ask some monkeys.
In Jonathan Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind, he explores why people are so divided over politics, religion, and “group-ish”-ness.
He convincingly argues that despite the long-held belief that people vote in their own best interest, the fact is that we really don’t. Why else would some of the country’s lowest-income regions consistently vote for politicians committed to further reducing their income and eliminating social safety nets?
In fact, we really vote based on whatever group we identify ourselves with — and this instinct has evolutionary roots.
When you consider the lives of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, you realize that someone who didn’t conform with the group — who went their own way, didn’t help others and receive reciprocal help in return, and didn’t care about the praise or blame of the other members of the group — faced more than just social isolation. They probably ended up being gored, eaten, or gored and eaten by some prehistoric predator without the group’s support.
And so, our genetic history came to favor those who identified more closely with the group.
But wait a minute. Isn’t competitiveness the opposite of group cooperation? When I compete with you, aren’t I acting in an antisocial way, pitting myself as a loner against my fellow man/woman?
Not really.
Because competition is, at its core, a question of status. By definition, social status represents our relative position compared to someone else. It’s where we stand on the leaderboard. If you don’t identify with the group, then you won’t feel any need to compete with them.
As a primarily mountain and ultra runner, I don’t compare myself to volleyball players, or swimmers, or even sprinters and road runners. Other trail runners are my “group,” and my competitiveness stems from an innate desire to rise in status among that group — even if that status is measured in something as obscure and arbitrary as a certain app’s virtual leaderboard for some random stretch of dirt trail in Utah or Queensland.
Competition isn’t about separating ourselves from the group. It’s about being seen and admired by the group.
It’s even been theorized that language first developed so we could gossip about each other and compare relative status. Some linguists theorize that this allowed us to talk together about those who weren’t confirming to the group ideals, in turn strengthening bonds between those of us who properly followed the social contract.
Comparing status, and trying to elevate our own status, is in our genes.
Want more proof ? Look at our primate relatives that are still around today.
It’s well known that groups of chimps regularly go to war with other chimps over territory. What’s a little less well known — and amounts to something very far from a “fun fact" — is that the winning group doesn’t just move in and displace the losers. They will generally kill and dismember the members of the losing group, particularly the males.
Why? Evolution amounts to genes trying to survive. More peaceful chimps aren’t around anymore, because their genes were eliminated by the chimps that didn’t stop competing once the territory was won, the ones who made sure their competition wasn’t around to compete a second time.
But we’re not chimps. We’re human beings. We’ve moved beyond Darwinist, survival-of-the-fittest competition for limited resources. But those genes are still in us.
So what role should our innate competitiveness play in our lives?
I joked in the introduction that Strava’s Segments weren’t good for my mental health. But the reality is that the competitiveness they brought me didn’t really hurt me — or Doug, the imaginary object of my competitive fury.
In fact, my desire to rise up in some of those leaderboards was a key motivation for me to get in better shape after 25+ years of having no deliberate fitness or nutrition plan. With no in-person races available in the depths of COVID, and my usual exercise of basketball eliminated from the equation, those little virtual leaderboards got me out on the trails even when I was tired and sore, long before running was the daily, hardwired habit it is for me today.
In many ways, I owe my health and much of my current way of life to my obsessive leaderboard chasing back in 2020.
To me, these are the places where competitiveness belongs in our modern life. When it gamifies good habits, or gives us an opportunity to socially bond over a shared pursuit that has no bearing on our life outside of fun and health. The weekly basketball games I play in with friends here on the Sunshine Coast serve the same purpose — a group of people competing together, trying to beat another group, both groups benefitting from the excitement and physical activity as a result. Even if you’re the loser, you walk away from the competition to a life in which that loss has no real bearing.
I think competitiveness becomes damaging when it bleeds into our “real” lives. I readily admit that despite daily practice to free myself, I still feel jealousy, envy, and competitiveness over things like material wealth, home size, income, career success, etc.
When we moved from Utah to Australia, it meant selling the home we owned and going back to renting, since my U.S.-based, self-employed earnings that make up the majority of our income were a big no thanks for Australian mortgage lenders.
I admit it: that perceived change in status, from “owner” back to “renter,” stung me. It wasn’t until some months passed, and I realized that my day-to-day life was no different, and that a backyard swimming pool is a blast whether you can say “I OWN THIS” or not, that I began to be able to let go of the embarrassingly childish burn of that imagined status-change.
“Comparison is the thief of joy,” Teddy Roosevelt famously said. And what is comparison but the competition that goes on in our heads, the constant ranking and re-ranking of ourselves relative to the groups we identify with — the people in our neighborhood, the friends we went to high-school with, other people in their 30s, etc.?
So play stupid competitive games, even if they’re only in your head or inside an app. Embrace the genes that got us here. Then remember that we are not our genes. And despite all those group labels those genes tell us to use, remember that they’re all imaginary. Status is a fiction, even if it’s a convincing one.
A game can be measured in points on a scoreboard. A life can’t be, so let’s stop trying.
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I have such a love/hate relationship with Strava. To be fair, I've never been good enough to even check my standing on segments, so maybe that's why I don't feel as competitive.
What's made it worse is that I (for whatever reason) decided to get into triathlons, which is to say, instead of feeling good about 1 sport, I get to feel mediocre about 3 sports.