Is life more competitive these days? I have no idea how to measure that, but there is no doubt that we live in a nation - and a world - full of strivers.
My guess is that it's because opportunity is more widely spread around than in the past. The world has more hopers and dreamers than it ever did, and that is the true gift - or curse - of American civilization to the world.
Akst's Strive We Must in the Wilson Quarterly discusses the current state of competition in education, sports, business, and everything else. A quote:
Competition has also been rescued to some extent from the class-based doghouse in which it dwelt for so long. In the bad old days, after all, trying too hard was considered poor form; success was supposed to come easily, like one’s wealth and position, and not require any of the sweaty striving associated with the lower orders. Those days are blessedly past—we are all sweaty strivers now—yet we remain ambivalent about this state of affairs. We feel nostalgia for the ethos of good form, and for the freedom from class anxiety we might have felt in a more static society. Who among us has not referred, at some point, to competitive modern life as a rat race? Which of us has not vowed, sooner or later, to foreswear it, presumably in favor of a return to our natural state of romping in the meadows with the butterflies? We want our kids to do well, yet competition is something we want to shelter them from. That’s why, in northern California, some high schools with large numbers of Asian-American students are experiencing white flight among families who find the academic environment a mite too...hectic.
Read the whole interesting essay (link above).
