¡°Competition¨CMisery¡± Vicious Cycle - By: PC Teoh

I have written a few posts in the past, which were my proposed ideas to shape a better future for us. The posts are the series about Collaborative Advantage, and later about Misery and Simple Living. I have created these posts randomly based on ideas that stroke my mind. The reason they were discussed was because they spelled out the current dilemma in us today when we are moving rapidly towards broader globalization. As my thought evolved, I have started to find the connections among them. Here¡¯s an attempt to put them into a better perspective.

In every one of us, we realize that there are needs that required to be fulfilled. These needs vary from people to people, and from time to time. Sometime, our needs turn out to be excessive desires. Excessive desire can be things that we want that are not the necessity in life. Some of the desires can be achieved by having a lot of money. Hence, money has become the target for many of us in our daily activities. In addition to that, we add even more requirements to our list, such as to acquire comfort, luxury, recognition, fame and power.

With the advanced technology, our ability to exploit the world resources increases tremendously. As an example, just look at the way we have exploited our natural energy resources. The world resources are limited, but our desires are not. So when every one of us demands more from the world, we have to compete among ourselves to have them. Competition is a characteristic of living beings for survival. However, animals only compete for basic needs such as food, water, shelter, and mate. Human has far more desires than animals. To fulfill these desires, competitions are far more intense. Tough competitions among human beings occur in many areas such as business, politics and even religions. People will do their best to stop their competitors from achieving their goals. Hence, competitions will create even higher barriers for any desire to be fulfilled.

When desires are not fulfilled, we experience psychological stresses. These stresses then turn into physical discomfort. Under these conditions, we will lose our ability to think logically. The prolonged state of feeling overwhelmed puts us into misery. Human beings will do anything at all costs to remove that feeling. Misery is very dangerous as it provokes human to act irrationally.

We are not independent, but interdependent among ourselves. We can easily spread our emotions to the rest of the world. As we move towards higher degree of globalization, our individual actions have higher impacts to the world than before. We need to be aware that we will have even heavier responsibility in our actions. What we do as an individual carries more weight than before. For example, ideas we uploaded to the Internet can reach further to the rest of the world. Hence, we have the power to spread positive or negative energy to the world. We can globalize our business, entertainment and works. At the same time, we can also globalize negative forces, such as terrorism, hatred and fear.

The root of negative forces originated from the misery within individuals. These individuals teamed up to express their dissatisfaction to the world, which have been blamed as the source of their misery. The formation of groups out of misery is a sign of competition being evolved into confrontation, which in turn, will create more misery and into never-ending ¡°competition¨Cmisery¡± vicious cycles.

As mentioned earlier, our misery originated from our desires. As human beings, we require basic needs to survive. Any unfulfilled need could create misery. Hence, misery is part of us, which cannot be totally eliminated as long as we live. However, if the desires were excessive, we will create greater misery to ourselves as well as others. We must understand this is something that we can control. We can minimize our misery by reducing our excessive desires. With less desires, we live happier lives. Hence, simple living is the practice that we need to adopt to reduce our misery in lives. We can improve our inner health through simple living. The impact will go beyond an individual. Simple life will also reduce the stress we imposed onto the environment and the people around us, which is something that we urgently need to do.

However, it is not enough if only certain group of people practice simple living, while large groups of people compete to fulfill their greed. Through competitions, misery will spread to innocent people who may not wish to get involve. That was why I recommended an alternative, i.e. collaboration. With our mind switched from competition to collaboration, we are thinking about win-win. We will become more thoughtful about people around us. We will be conscious that we do not create misery while trying to achieve our goals.
In my opinion, our future should be guided the principles of simple life as well as collaborative thinking. By living a simpler life, we will avoid filling ourselves with excessive desire, which is the source of misery. Our actions need to be guided by collaborative thinking so that our actions do not create misery for the people around us. There practices will ensure that we concentrate on building better (but not extravagant) lives, not only for few, but also for all. Although it¡¯s not easy, by practicing simple living and building collaborative advantage, we have a better chance to break free from the ¡°Competition-Misery¡± vicious cycle that has haunted us for so long.

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The author is the owner of the website: http://www.chrysalisjournal.com The original article is captured in: http://www.chrysalisjournal.com/wordpress/?p=681

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