Today I met up with an old friend from high school.
Since we have just graduated high school, it has actually only been weeks since we last met each other. Yet when we ask the typical first question when we meet someone we haven’t seen in a while, ‘How are you?’, a competitive spirit immediately stirred inside of me.
I instinctively scoured through the time I spent during the summer break and picked out my best achievements, mini projects that I have been working on, or any activities that are deemed productive by societal standards. I find this behaviour not as a unique, personal one but quite common all across the globe.
During high school reunions, something unspoken yet ever so pervasive is that every single person is comparing themselves to their former peers, and measuring their own success against the others. We all want to find out where we rank on the pecking order amongst our former classmates, and see where we belong on this social pyramid. Not only that, it is also such an instinctive behaviour, to try to exaggerate the things that we have done over the years, and try to make ourselves look better than we really are, so that we are closer to the top in other people’s mental pyramid.
Is this rat race that we forced ourselves into beneficial, and drives us to achieve more? Or is it a death race that casts a negative light on ourselves, making us more insecure about ourselves?