It’s worth remembering that although ‘survival of the fittest’ is a natural occurrence, it isn’t done as self-consciously as people like to pretend. A shark doesn’t ‘decide’ to be top of its food chain, it just is. It’s a description of the way things are, not a philosophy on how things ought to be, so people who parrot it to justify the things that they do are ignoring the difference between science and philosophy. We as human beings get to make decisions, we get to question the way the world is, and we have the ability to reflect on things we’ve done and try to change that going forward. If you just think that competition is the only way to live your life, then what makes you different to any other animal? Another way to look at it is that, honestly, most things can be boiled down to competition even if it’s not serious or aggressive. And whether we want it to be true or not, even something as mundane as conversation can be a form of competing, either with one another or against an imagined opponent. When I write a piece of poetry there’s a niggling voice in the back of my mind, that wants this piece to be the best it can be, or even the best just against all my other pieces if not against all of recorded literature. So in this way can we really escape competition if we wanted to? Why do you want to well in school? Or have a good job? Or be happy? Because you want to be ‘better’; better than you are/were/could be, or better than others in various senses, but either way this is competition no? I think the main issue here is how far we let competition control our conscious lives. Among the ABM (ambient black metal) and heavy shoegaze music scenes there was a widely-hailed artist known as The Angelic Process who were active around the mid-2000s. They were a duo, a couple. The guy was a perfectionist to such an extent, that when he suffered a hand injury and could no longer play music the way he could before, he fell into a deep depression and the material abruptly stopped, and a year or so later he killed himself. If he’s had more flexibility in his thinking or was willing to set realistic standards for himself, maybe he wouldn’t have done that. Should people really be consciously competing with themselves or others every minute of every day? My answer would be no.