Clairvoyant notes on scarcity and competition
Photo by Rene Bernal on Unsplash
Are scarcity and competition the best way to do things, or can we choose a more creative cooperative path?
So much of what we are taught from the beginning of our lives is unconscious. We all learn from watching how others around us deal with emotions, challenges, and opportunities, or lack of. Money, health, wealth, joy, peace, and anything you can think of shows up in this programming. Programming can be learned behavior that we choose, and it can also be an unconscious underlying automatic response.
If our parents were taught or believed that scarcity was how things were, or they experienced it themselves, that became the base their lives were built upon. Their actions and choices were influenced in a big way by this early programming.
This is true for all of us. That internalized information becomes programming that runs through us, much of it beneath the surface, unconsciously. Some of it is helpful, it teaches us how to successfully navigate through whatever situation we are in. We go to school to be programmed, we take classes and trainings to learn something, a skill, permission, ability.
There’s no absolute right or wrong way to do this, the question is does your programming work for you? You can change it if you wish.
Competition simply exists, it’s part of everyday life.
Whether you’re conscious to the effects of competition or not, it’s there: in traffic, school admissions, classrooms, elections, popularity contests, getting a job or clients, winning a contest, getting the best seats at a concert, making the most money, and so on. It’s never ending, and not necessarily all bad or all good.
Different energies can come along with competition, including scarcity, survival fears, invalidation, judgment, anger, fighting, war. Competition can also be a friendly race, a chess game, a way to play and excel, to push yourself further. There are many playful fun ways to compete too.
It can really validating and fun to win an award you worked hard to win. We play games with each other for points, and we compete with ourselves all the time.
But when it becomes the only way to think and live, competition can shut us down. It isolates and invalidates us, and we don’t grow and become.
We were taught that the natural order of things is ‘survival of the fittest’, which everyone took to mean that those who were bigger, stronger, faster, smarter, deserved to win and survive. This became kind of a background belief for an economic system that is all about competition, thrives on it, and creates value based on scarcity.
Photo by "My Life Through A Lens" on Unsplash
Unless you were raised in an environment that taught and encouraged cooperation, and it was mirrored in the actions of the adults around you, you might have simply accepted that competition was the rule of thumb. Winning was the best thing to do. It can be difficult to imagine that there can be another way to live.
Depending on your privilege, or lack thereof, If your family and neighborhood saw competition as necessary for survival, it became the smart thing to do.
Capitalism thrives on scarcity and competition, and since it is the economic system that we currently have, its teachings are ingrained into all of us from birth. We were taught in school to compete, to get the best grades, be the best student or athlete or whatever. We were also taught how to cooperate, to wait in line and allow others to go before us, to take turns, to work in teams to get a task done or play a game, to help each other.
It’s natural to work with others, we need each other. And we humans are so very good at cooperating - we organize, form groups, unions, and teams, create big projects together, give to each other, and help each other out, all the time. It feels good to work with others when everyone is cooperating and giving.
Cooperation is giving. Constant competition isn’t about giving.
Cooperation is right alongside competition, only singing a different song. When you become aware of this in your own life, you’ll start to notice how these energies play out, and how they affect you emotionally and energetically.
If we were to only see or strive for the energy of having to be first, of winning whatever race we’re running, or think we should run, we might miss a lot of what we’re passing along the way. I personally find constant competition pointless and exhausting, and my body doesn’t like it either. What about yours?
The programmed demand to succeed that is built into us from birth comes along with a fear that if we don’t play the game and win, we will be shamed as losers. But what if you’re neutral to this, and don’t care what others think about you? What if you decide for yourself that you are fine, just as you are, and if someone needs to compete with you, you have no control over that. Let them compete, I say!
As a clairvoyant reader and teacher, I know that one form of competition that never works is spiritual competition. I know that there is no competition for any of us when we are being ourselves, in our own truth. Nobody can compete with you when you love you and are choosing to be exactly as you are.
At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch-22 over its whole history.
Heller responds,“Yes, but I have something he will never have — ENOUGH.”
Quote from ‘The Psychology of Money’, author Morgan Housel
