For me, one important realization was that my original emotions around this kind of assumed a competition where not-winning was actually negative.
Isn’t that what we were trained for? I mean, school is a competition, capitalism is a competition; even many forms of cooperation include a hidden threat that you might be replaced by someone who is better to cooperate with.
(Uh, I am not really satisfied with what I wrote here, but I cannot improve it at the moment, at it feels to me that it’s pointing towards something important, so I am leaving it here.)
You are right. Somehow I had failed to attribute this to culture.
There clearly are lots of systems with a zero-sum competitive mentality.
Compared to the US, the German school and social system seems significantly less competitive to me (from what I can tell, living only in the latter). There still is a lot of competition, but my impression is that there are more niches which provide people with slack.
Isn’t that what we were trained for? I mean, school is a competition, capitalism is a competition; even many forms of cooperation include a hidden threat that you might be replaced by someone who is better to cooperate with.
(Uh, I am not really satisfied with what I wrote here, but I cannot improve it at the moment, at it feels to me that it’s pointing towards something important, so I am leaving it here.)
You are right. Somehow I had failed to attribute this to culture. There clearly are lots of systems with a zero-sum competitive mentality.
Compared to the US, the German school and social system seems significantly less competitive to me (from what I can tell, living only in the latter). There still is a lot of competition, but my impression is that there are more niches which provide people with slack.