Competition is Good

To slightly paraphrase Gordon Gekko in Wall Street: "Competition is good. Competition is right, competition works. Competition clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Competition, in all of its forms; competition for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind."

For some people, Gekko's sentiment (actually about greed) isn't true. How many times have you heard the expressions "It's not a race!", and "There's no 'I' in 'Team'"? From personal experience, I've found that some people believe that competitiveness in an individual is a sign of his or her arrogance. I kept getting told off by my history teacher, Mr Lachette, for always trying to beat my classmate's grades. Junior football matches are increasingly being played nowadays without someone keeping score so that the losing side doesn't get too upset...

But I respectively disagree. Competitiveness is what makes us human beings and should not be suppressed.

Just look at a few of history's greatest rivalries and you can see how far competitiveness, whether in business, academia, science, sport, or the arts, has constantly pushed mankind forwards. Look at Nike and Adidas, Muhammad Ali and Joe Frasier, Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci, Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison (pictured). The latter rivalry demonstrates well how, behind every invention and discovery ever made, every achievement in history, there has almost always been another individual whose competitive spirit helped the victor to reach his or her potential. This coming August at the London Olympic Games, Asafa Powell will no doubt push Usain Bolt to break the 100 meters world record yet again.

According to their biographer, Vasari, Da Vinci (left) and Michelangelo (right) had "an intense dislike for each other"

And it's not just the 'greats' who benefit from man's instinctive desire to be the best; we all do. Take, for example, the local swimming pool. Have you ever been swimming along at your own leisurely pace - perhaps one length per minute - noticed out of the corner of your eye another swimmer who's going a little faster than you, and increased your speed to stay ahead? Maybe you don't even think about it, but you probably do.

Recently, I've been involved in an intense but silent rivalry with a swimmer who is significantly more advanced in years than myself. When I fist saw him in the pool, I naively didn't consider him a threat for this reason, but boy can the man swim. I'm solely a breaststroke man, while he effortlessly alternates between front crawl and breaststroke. We're equally fast when it comes to breaststroke, which he does once every three lengths, but his front crawl is frustratingly - fractionally - quicker than even my best efforts. No matter how hard I try, he always pulls ahead of me. But that doesn't stop me trying every single week to beat him. The rivalry has made me a stronger swimmer and an overall healthier person. It's also transformed what would otherwise be a dull, repetitive affair into something quite exciting in its own insignificant way.

We'd been at this twice a week for three months, not speaking once or even acknowledging each other's exististence. I didn't even know if it was a two-way rivalry until we met by chance in the locker room one evening. He kindly went out of his way to hold the door open for me and said: "You're a fine swimmer." I answered, "You're brilliant. I always try to keep up with you, actually." "Oh really? I always try to stay ahead of you."

That's the best form of rivalry, I think - a silent one. No one gets hurt and you both get the benefit of having a rival. There is an important etiquette to all forms of competition which should never be broken. The first step in a rivalry is respecting one's opponent. Throughout history, though, competition has gained a bad name due to arms races, countries going to war, husbands killing their wives' lovers. Indeed, competition can be used as an excuse to do evil.

Teamwork is important in life, but a team consists of individuals, and rivalry, when done right, makes those individuals better. So, be competitive. Have a rival in all that you do. As long as you shake hands when the race is won - or lost - competition is one of the things that makes life worth living.

On a final note, I've just completed an English Literature degree that was mainly fuelled by my competitiveness. Every assignment represented a chance to beat the friends and acquaintences whose work I respected the most - not in a malicious way, but solely as a way of improving myself. I ended up with the highest overall score.

Wait a minute, it was the joint highest.

And the other person just beat my dissertation.

Room for improvement.

Generation Y

You hear it a lot in the news: Generation Y - or the Facebook Generation, if you prefer - is going to live for a long time. My generation. Indeed, it will live for longer than any generation in history. Improvements in medicine, technology, the supposed end of the West's love affair with nicotine - someone has run all the countless variables through a super computer and determined that our average life expectancy will be remarkably high. The actuaries have calculated how much more we'll have to contribute to our pension schemes in order to stay in bread when we're 95, and, based on their changes to public sector pensions and tax increases, it seems that the government also has faith in our longevity. Either that or they just want to tax us more.

But are 'we' really going to live that long?

Call me a cynic, but when I look around, all I see are members of my generation and those of younger generations, getting excessively drunk every Friday night (doing untold damage to their livers in the process), smoking, maybe taking drugs, breakfasting at Burger King, and sitting for hours every day in front of TV and computer screens. How many Facebook statuses does one have to read that say "I got so wasted last night" before one starts to wonder if the scientists have made a big error in predicting a long and healthy life for 'us'? It was the baby boomers' good habits which have resulted in their longevity, more than medical advances.

Yet I can't argue with those medical advances. New cancer treatments, stem cell research (whether ethical or not), and other breakthroughs will certainly cure a lot of our diseases and mend our broken bones faster than ever before. However, at the risk of making a sweeping generalisation, it seems to me that my generation isn't looking after itself anywhere near well enough to live as long as, say, my grandmother, who's in her 80s. I'm not removing myself from this sad truth either: I could lose some weight; I've been sitting at this laptop for hours without getting up once. Who'd have thought that a chair could kill? But then again I've never smoked, I don't drink alcohol, and I'm more of a McDonald's kind of guy...just kidding.

The baby boomers have enjoyed unnaturally long lives, partly because they've benefited from the same advances 'we' will benefit from even more, but chiefly, I think, because they were born into a post-World-War-Two environment. When my mother was growing up in 1950s Liverpool, rationing was still in operation. It was a world in which children such as she could run freely through fields after school without their parents living in constant, media-fuelled fear of them scratching themselves, or being abducted. It was a time when there was still something to fight for. As for 'us' who were born in the late twentieth century, however, the world's been flattened and simplified so much that we're practically sedated in comparison.   

If I were one of those scientists, I'd stop shouting from the rooftops about how long Generation Y is going to live. It's the job of government to prepare for this eventuality, because it's largely a fact. 'We' are going to live longer than any previous generation. If I were them, I'd be more concerned with warning the young people of today who are abusing themselves in the name of YOLO that they're actually going to die much sooner than they need to. Yes, medicine has cured some terrible diseases that a person of my age in Britain can only imagine; yes, technology has opened up incredible possibilities. But please let's go back to basics. Eat more healthily, stop the binge drinking, put down the iPhone for five minutes and go for a walk with your mum around the block. That's the ticket to living a longer life, which no generation has a God-given right to. It has to be earned.