On the Madness of Comparing Ourselves to Others

CrossFit, Creativity, and Captain Cook

Marcus Curtius. John Martin. 1827.

I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Kyle Shepard over at Resilient Mental State. You can watch or listen to the podcast here:

Primal Hardship with Sam Alaimo

We talked about healthy forms of catastrophizing, primal hardship, perspective (the theme of this essay), and much more.

Now let’s lean into today’s piece…

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Falsely content—Most of us are addicted to comparing ourselves to others. I have learned through failure we can walk a different path: we should not be addicted to comparing ourselves to others, but to assaulting the comparison itself.

All things that live and breathe—fig, dog, human—grow content once they think they won or lost the immediate game. This is to its ruin, as we will see. For if the living thing does not lose its life, it does not live a full life either.

But humans are distinct. We hold within us a creative potential that I do not think we have begun to understand. It is less important to me what we as a species have done, and more for what we as a species are—only then can we do something truly original and creative.

Let us start with penguins.

I am not so great after all—The Arctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott put words to penguins as only an Englishman can. He and his dogs were the first new living things these penguins had seen from across the seas.

He wrote: “From the moment of landing on their feet their whole attitude expressed devouring curiosity and a pig-headed disregard for their own safety. They waddle forward, poking their heads to and fro in their usually absurd way, in spite of a string of howling dogs straining to get at them. ‘Hulloa!’ they seem to say, ‘here’s a game—what do all you ridiculous things want?’ And they come a few steps nearer. The dogs make a rush as far as their harness or leashes allow. The penguins are not daunted in the least, but their ruffs go up and they squawk with semblance of anger, for all the world as though they were rebutting a rude stranger—their attitude might be imagined to convey, ‘Oh, that’s the sort of animal you are; well, you’ve come to the wrong place—we aren’t going to be bluffed and bounced by you,’ and then the final fatal steps forward are taken and they come within reach. There is a spring, a squawk, a horrid red patch on the snow, and the incident is closed.”

Woe to the vanquished! Woe to the penguin whose attempt to “know thyself” was capped by its tiny little ice world!

As with penguins, so with humans.

I am not so great after all REDUX—The Mesopotamians had achieved in 2,500 BC what the Aztecs achieved in 1,500 AD—a full 4,000 years prior. So is it surprising that when Spanish conquistadors set foot on the shores of the American continent the natives did not stand a chance?

The significant point is our natives—like our penguins—did not know the Old World existed. The pinnacle of their culture and technology allowed the Aztecs to enslave and cut the hearts out of the primitive hunter-gatherers around their cities with bright eyes and grins. And yet their pinnacle was primitive compared to the Western invaders. Their people were wiped off the face of the earth by a handful of weird diseases, some steel blades, a bit of gun powder, and swarms of tens of millions of people from over the horizon.

Their dominance was their weakness. They did not train for what might exist on the other side of the ocean—for what they could have imagined.

Did they learn from their lesson?

Did we?

Guilty even at the apex of optimization—One striking feature of the CrossFit community is how many people smile. There is a breathless vitality in the air around them that rubs off. I love what CrossFit has done for giving people fitness and tribe.

I was a spectator at a CrossFit competition the other week and my eyes were drawn to the details: bags of dried mango, canisters of creatine, IV drips packed with vitamins and minerals, neon colored pants and shoes and headbands, statuesque muscles, positive affirmations, bass-heavy music that makes you want to grunt and sweat and spit and lift. The environment speaks of motivation, excellence, optimization, thriving, overcoming.

My mind turned to this question of perspective while I walked among these über-athletes. They are the pinnacle of physical fitness, yes, but their fatal flaw is that they are comparative in their physicality. They can crush a metabolic conditioning workout and yet be crushed by an insignificant variable: an unusually cold metal barbell, a judge who miscounts a repetition, a bad night of sleep, an indentation in the dirt floor that makes an Olympic lift awkward.

At the same time, on the other side of the seas, you can watch a ninety-five-pound Afghan man fail to deadlift a ninety-five-pound barbell. But sure enough he can sprint forty-pounds of machine guns and bullets up and down cliffs on a few Otis Spunkmeyer cookies and a mouthful of river water to wrap up the day, before sleeping a few hours on a mud and feces covered floor to do it all over again. This is not an exaggeration. No foam rollers, HRV trackers, bougie clothes, cash prizes, or sports psychology needed.

It is a contradiction to say “I am ready for anything” and then not be ready for anything outside of a gym. Old-school CrossFit inevitably gave way to New-school CrossFit. Just so with athletes in football, tennis, golf, bobsledding, and (nearly) everything else. But a perfectly controlled environment is actually a fiction layered on top of a more fascinating world. And a stunningly muscled body can be blind to just how exceptionally we can grind when the lights of civilization are shut off and the fiction meets reality.

Goethe said “Experience is only half of experience.” He meant that what we do is worthless unless we do something with it—something epic, introspective, and creative.

The human problem—This is not merely a physical problem. It is a professional, intellectual, societal, existential, and human problem. Is it due to a lack of über-comparisons? That would be strange. We have mythology, history, and imaginations. What then is the limiting factor? My hunch is many people do not think it can happen because they cannot see it, and because they cannot see it, they do not take their creative capacity seriously.

It would seem our species is the height of the penguin mentality, but it is not.

This refusal to take creativity seriously makes the human inferior to the penguin: the penguin cannot see beyond, whereas the human chooses not to.

Beyond mere human competition—A completely isolated individual will never tap into a fraction of human potential; the comparative individual will win and be vulnerable or lose and never stand a chance; but the creative individual gazes into others, self, and cosmos—and then goes beyond.

So what are we missing? How do we break this cycle?

Captain Cook wrote that he “… had ambition not only to go farther than anyone had been before, but as far as it was possible for man to go.” He not only looked left and right and said “I must beat these men.” He not only read history and said “I can do better.” He not only looked at himself and said “What is the maximum I can be?” Instead he transcended precedent and made of himself a one-man laboratory of the human condition.

The tendency of all breathing things is to grow comfortable—and then stop growing. This is the posture that breaks that.

My hunch is this creative posture is made of something like this: it is to think so independently that our competition is not what is seen with our eyes, but what can be seen with our imaginations; it is a delight in assaulting assumptions and precedents and how-to guides and any half-digested opinions; it is an unquenchable curiosity for what our unseen enemy is doing at this very second; it is to suffer and by doing so lift the curtain of normality and gaze beyond it into reality; it is to take ourselves by the shoulders, and shake ourselves, and scream Wake up.

It is to always wonder what lies on the other side of the seas.

And yet… I have never seen this embodied in a single human.

Almost all of my thinking and writing is dedicated to reconning this existential posture, this revolutionarily uncapped form of existence. Glimpses of it can be seen on the walls of Chauvet Cave, in the fluid mithril-like movements of SEALs flowing through rooms in Close Quarters Combat, in the words of Sophocles, Jünger, and Tolkien, in an athlete whose body walks up to a barbell but whose mind is on a hunt 20,000 years ago, in the contemplation of ascetics like Siddhartha or Epictetus, and in the rockets filled with über-apes shot into space.

Mouse-holing the walls of a conventional life—It is possible that the most fulfilling life is one in which we ask questions we may never answer, imagine comparisons that may never exist, and train for trials that may never come.

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