I would say that I have always had a strong competitive personality, even when I was a little kid. Whether it was playing AYSO as a two-year-old, getting the first spot at the lunch table in elementary school, or running the mile in fifth grade, I always wanted to be in first. 

As I grew older, this sense of competitiveness drove me as a person in a good way. As I began to mature, my opinion on competition was altered. The point wasn’t to be first or to be the best, but it was to push myself to my full potential in everything I did. 

To this day, I love the feeling of competition. It activates a sense of excitement within me and feeds me a constant supply of ambition. I use my competition to push myself as a person; I matured to find the positive side of competition.

In today’s society, I feel like competition among people is very prominent. Whether it is two companies busting their businesses against each other, two hospitals competing for most patients, or two restaurants fighting for customers, competition can be found everywhere.

Often times, we can owe a great deal of our success to the standards of competition; it pushes us to achieve the most we can. However, in recent times, I feel like the level of competition is on a constant upward increase, meaning society is constantly becoming more and more competitive.

When a new product has its big debut, the next best thing is usually just days behind. The competition within society is constantly running, and honestly, it might be sending our generations into unhealthy areas. 

Like I initially said, competition exists to push us to achieve the greatest things that we can. However, when there is so much competition going on around us, the levels that we must reach to race with the competition are so high that it’s nearly impossible to compete—it’s impossible to win.

Take college for example. In the early 2000s, and even before then, college was obviously still competitive, depending on where you wanted to go, but it was a healthy balance between difficult and too difficult.

Nowadays, for most students to get into the college of their dreams is beyond a healthy level of competitiveness. There are thousands of students around the world that are facing sleep deprivation, stress, anxiety, and a boatload of other things due to the fact that they are simply pushing themselves too hard in high school.

No longer will a 4.0 GPA get you into a top school. Certain colleges are asking students to finish high school with a 4.3, 4.5, and above. Since the standard was raised so much, the entire process of getting into college has become an unhealthily competitive process. The competition that should motivate us to do our best is pushing us to our absolute peaks, and even beyond, which can end up being a lot more detrimental.

Another example is life after college: real life and real jobs.

So, students around the world compete their hardest to get into their college of choice. And then, those students also compete their way throughout college in order to set themselves up to be successful in life. However, all of this hard work is then met by the immense amount of competition that exists out in the real world—the competition that exists when attempting to get a real job.

Over the years, it has become much more common for people to follow career paths. Along with more people interested in getting a job, there have also been several improvements in technology that also take away jobs. This means that in this day and age, you are not only competing with millions of other people for a job, but you may very well also be competing with technology for a job. 

The reality is that no matter what you are doing, you are probably competing with someone. With growth and development always occurring around the world, there is bound to be a rise in competition among people. And with the rate at which our society has been evolving and modernizing in the past decade, this competition level has reached unresting levels. 

Originally, competition was something that generated motivation within people; it pushed us to accomplish our goals. Now, competition still does exactly that, but the level to which one has to compete at in order to stay with the so-called “pack” has risen exponentially,so that it may be pushing us past our healthy limits.

Like I said before, I am someone who loves to compete—always have, always will. But as a member of a newer generation, I am finding it nearly impossible to compete in the world around me. The expectations are high, so the competition requirements are even higher.

We are living in a world that constantly continues to become more and more competitive.