Winning the Defeat

Why do we race? Why we always want to stay ahead of others? Why we want to get better grades than other students in our class? Why we want promotions and increments faster than our colleagues? If you stop and take a deep breath, you will realize how short is the life span of the fame you get by staying ahead in one lap of a race. No one remembers you longer than that lap. And no one remembers who lost the race to you. The fact is – there are too many races to remember the position holders of each of those.

Not only this, but we see that most of the people prefer to compete with the people they see or directly interact with. We conveniently forget that there are classes outside our class and there are offices outside our office. But we never bother comparing our performance with the students or colleagues. We mostly prefer to compete within a very closed group of people.

Now, the question is ‘why do we do this?’. Why such a strange behavior? Why do we get so happy when we beat the student next bench or the employee next cubicle, even when we certainly know that there is an endless stream of more bright students and more efficient employees? Why we want a better car than our neighbor? Why a better kept lawn? Why better jewelry than your kitty party fellows?

The answer lies in very narrow minded tendency of human brain. You don’t want to see yourself win as much as you want to see others to lose to you. That is why we want to compete with the people we can see or directly interact. And that is why I would like to win in rowing than in any other race, because only there I can see others losing to me.

But if you want to do better in life, get out of that pond. Winning every battle doesn’t matter, winning the war does.

Problems are to stay…

If you are reading this, I can bet that you have, at some point of your life, discussed the difference between humans and other animals. Then we come across many answers – opposable thumbs, language, sharing, laughing, greed, intelligence, rape (yes, rape! Think about it) etc. But I always feel that these answers are only partially true.

When I think about human behavior, I always wonder why a very obvious feature has always been neglected. This feature, in my opinion, has made this world as we see it. This feature has divided the animal kingdom between humans and other than humans. This feature has given us all our failures and successes. And this feature is – we, humans, always look for trouble.

Now don’t confuse this with curiosity. Monkeys and cats never ask for troubles, they are just curious. That gets them in trouble. Likewise, many animals get in trouble because of hunger or thirst. But this is not the case with humans. We get in trouble all the time because of all the reasons that animals have. Also, in addition to that, we have a natural tendency to ask for troubles.

If you look around, you will notice that humans either tend to unnecessary pile up wealth and fame, or they tend to destroy it. Both ways, they ask for more problems in their life. Only because of this tendency, we have discovered all the corners of the world and also we have terrible road accidents. Only because of this tendency we have business tycoons and also we have lives ruined with alcohol. Only because of this tendency, we like to solve puzzles and also we like to watch family dramas in typical Indian daily soaps (as if we don’t have enough to care about in our own lives and so we need to worry about the problems of billionaire families on screens).

No matter what you do, or you don’t do – all of us always want a certain amount of problems and troubles in our life. If somebody is not so bright in studies, he is already in trouble. If he is bright, then he will not study – asking for problems. If he likes studying too, then he will go for the toughest course! And we like to talk about our (or others’) problems too. If suddenly we change our attitude and decide to keep problems and troubles out of our lives with united efforts, we certainly can. But then, what will we talk about? And what will we live for? And if you think further on this line, this is the very reason why communism failed, isn’t it?

So if your life is full of problems, it only means that you are human!