REFER TO GREY: Contemplations by Robert Greigos © 2007-2026

Have you ever heard the term: “healthy competition”? Likely you have, but have you ever considered the meaning of that term relative to the kinds of competition you actually see around you? When you think about those various kinds of competition, do any of them seem “healthy” to you, for either those doing the competing or for the enveloping society and environment?

When I was very young, I remember waking up very early, earlier than either of my parents or my younger sister. It didn’t bother me in the least that I was totally alone with all my toys. I built things, roads: bridges, buildings, little towns. I peopled those towns with characters I invented that did things, things that contributed to the richness of life in those towns. Elaborate relationships between and amongst those characters filled my head with stories that animated those characters and those whole towns for me. I had absolutely no thought in my head that could possibly be construed as relating to competition. Instead, I was fully engrossed in an effort to create something.

Then later, after I entered school, I was introduced to something called “games”. Within a school environment, so call “games” were meant to introduce students to the concept of rules and to etiquette that took into account other student’s, other people’s. rights and feelings. And later, we were all introduced to the concepts “cooperation” and “team work”, but mostly within the framework of games and competition. There were, of course, exceptions to the theme of competition within school curricula. One was in the realm of music, where there was largely no sense of competition, only of creation. True, even within the realm of music there was the occasional presence of competition: to be “first chair” or “soloist”, or when entire ensembles entered inter-school competitions. But mostly, within music, the prevailing intent was to discover and master the ability to create something beautiful, an experience that was both enjoyable and inspiring for both performer and listener.

As to the concept “healthy competition”, people will point to games as a way to hone socially useful skills and to re-channel feelings of isolation, anxiety, anger, hate, and desire for violent aggression. Well, maybe. But competition would seem to be an entirely inadequate remedy toward many of those ends. We still have death due to fearful panic in crowds, spousal abuse, rape, incompetent and abusive parenting, murder, self-justified crime and mass killings, and we still have war, lots of war. Competitive games haven’t shown a great deal of success stamping out any of those social atrocities. Neither have even the most brutal of financial, social, religious, and corporal punishments.

Leaving aside why most of us construe life itself as competition: for resources, for mates, for status, for power and influence, let us instead look at the basic dynamics of competition. Put very simply, the end result of playing a game is that there are winners and there are losers. If you add the winnings and the losses together, you invariably end up with a net of zero, a zero-sum game. Now, if society intended stagnation, burning off loneliness, fear, anxiety, anger, and greed to an overall net of zero, then competition would seem the ideal cultural policy for society to follow. But a society that stagnates dooms itself to dissolution and/or extinction. Why? Because nature, the environment within which it exist, doesn’t stay the same. Neither do our bodies. They change. They evolve. If society as a whole doesn’t have a mechanism by which it can change as needed, to adapt, it eventually fails, gets left in the dust. Same for each of us as individuals.

No doubt you’ve heard all that before. But even if you have, why are we still doing the same thing, competing with each other? Why haven’t we all totally abandoned most forms of competition for something that will help all of us to be winners, with absolutely no losers? Why haven’t all of us abandoned competition and turned toward discovery and creation as fuel and satisfaction for our lives?

The news over the last few weeks has been almost continuously filled with stories of war, financial manipulations on a global scale, political corruption and incompetence, and needless deaths by cutting people off from resources they need to survive and prosper, not by competition or even exploitation, but by creation. Think farmers and fisherman. Think scientists. Think students and migrants hoping for a more useful and inspiring education, and safe opportunity to work and create. Think cuts to research grants, limiting discovery. Think cutting off access to inspiring and useful information, replaced by propaganda, lies, improbable fantasies, and hucksterism.

Now consider something more concrete, consider plain old things. Most things have multiple uses. That’s good. That’s efficient. Take a ship, for instance. It can facilitate travel and trade, and even enlightening and edifying social intercourse. It can also be used as an instrument of war, and for corrupt and environmentally destructive commerce. The difference is within our individual perceptions and in the uses its owners put it to. If individually we have any wider-world power at all, it is in the choices we make.

Choice empowers us with agency. And that agency can prove quite consequential if once we are absolutely sure our apprehensions are valid, and we take a thoughtful and considered look at the choices before us. All we need do is consider whether we are choosing to compete in a zero-sum game that further locks us into a downward slide toward extinction, as the world around us changes and leaves us in its dust, or whether we are choosing to seek discovery and proof of new knowledge useful for the creation of a more adaptive, successful, and satisfying life for each and every one of us.

Should your interest still not be piqued by what I’m saying, try imaging a string of endless competitions involving every person on Earth. Eventually, there will be a small group of winners superbly adept at winning. But very likely, no one in their numbers will be adept at doing anything other than winning. They likely won’t know how to farm, or purify water, or make electricity or produce heat, build shelter or predict the weather. They won’t know how to form an effective equitable government or an effective education system. They likely won’t even know how to get along with each other or how to share knowledge and resources for mutual benefit, or even how to competently parent their children. All they will likely know is how to conduct competition and war, with the looming inevitability of their own deaths within those competitions. Is that the kind of world we want for ourselves and our children?

And what of those who will say to themselves, “I create. I create jobs.”? Or, “I create. I create wealth, and opportunity for others to create wealth.”? The answer to those questions lies in the net accounting of wins and loses. Activities that create wins for some but increased losses for others and the environment is still a zero-sum game, a competition attempting to keep winners out above others, at loser’s expense. It isn’t a prescription for universal human health, wellbeing, and sustainability in a changing environment. When that kind of self-serving mindset takes hold of political elections and hiring in government, industry, education, and the military, we are headed toward fascism and away from equitable democracy. When that kind of mindset seriously infests economic markets, corruption rises and the quality of market offerings both deteriorates and thins out. By contrast, truly equitable markets minimize incentive for corruption and are open to and encouraging of all socially useful and healthful creativity and innovation, giving each of us more empowering choice.

To my mind, the future is quite literally in all of our thoughts and hands to create. Enjoy creating, not mindless and pointless competition that will eventually doom all of us.