Are We Competing Ourselves to Death?

The thread is simple… competition isn’t the problem, worshipping it as the only game worth playing is.

We live in a culture that worships competition. From the youth soccer field to the college classroom to the boardroom, we’re told that winning is the only currency that counts. But what happens when we push it too far? This piece pulls back the curtain on the hidden costs of our obsession with being first—how it shapes our kids, distorts education, corrodes mental health, and fuels a $19 billion youth sports machine.

By the end, you’ll see competition in a new light—not as the enemy, but as a tool we’ve misused. You’ll learn:

• Why 70% of kids quit sports by age 13

• How education has been hijacked by scoreboards and rankings

• The financial and emotional toll of treating winning as worth itself

• And most importantly, how we can rebalance the equation with collaboration, curiosity, and meaning.
  

If you’ve ever felt the treadmill of “prove yourself or be invisible,” this article is for you.

From the minute we’re born in America, we are drafted into a system of competition. We are handed off to daycares, measured by developmental milestones, funneled into classrooms where grades become currency, and sorted into categories before we even know what categories are. By the time we’re old enough to tie our own cleats, we’re already being told that success is about being first, first chair in the orchestra, first string on the team, first in the class, first to the finish line.

And God help you if you land anywhere else…

Competition has become our lingua franca. It is the air we breathe, the water we swim in, the invisible hand that isn’t so invisible once you actually look at it. It shapes the way we parent, the way we educate, the way we measure self-worth. And while it may be particularly acute in America, the roots of it run deep across Western ideology…the glorification of individualism, the obsession with meritocracy, the myth that only the strongest survive.

As an athlete, I know this intimately. I grew up competing all the way through college, team sports, individual sports, the field, the court. I loved it. I still do. There’s something primal about testing yourself against another, about pushing the body and the mind to discover what they’re capable of. Sports, in their purest form, can be a teacher. They’ve been with us since the beginning, lacrosse among the Haudenosaunee, Roman gladiators in the Colosseum, Spartan warriors sharpening themselves in brutal contests. Competition, in that context, reveals discipline, resilience, teamwork, sacrifice.

But when you take competition out of the arena and make it the organizing principle of everything, the inputs warp, the outputs corrode, and the meaning distorts.

I see it every weekend on youth fields. Parents foaming at the mouth as they scream at referees, pacing sidelines like they’re watching Game 7 of the NBA Finals, their entire identity knotted up in whether their nine-year-old scores a goal. They don’t just want their kid to play; they want them to dominate, to win at all costs, because maybe, just maybe, that win is a proxy for their own relevance. College scholarships, pro contracts, vicarious fame, it’s all on the table, even if the odds are one in a million.

“Seventy percent of kids quit organized sports by 13 — not because they hate the game, but because they hate the pressure.”

And the kids absorb it, hook, line, and sinker. They learn that their value is conditional, that love feels a lot like performance reviews, that joy can only be justified if the scoreboard agrees. “Compete or be invisible. Win or you don’t matter.” That’s the script they’re handed before they even know how to write their own.

And the question that keeps me awake at night mainly because my kids also are part of the system, at what cost to the child? At what cost to their sense of self, when every mistake is amplified by a parent’s fury? At what cost to their mental health, when comparison replaces curiosity, when pressure eclipses play? At what cost to their relationships, when sport becomes less about teammates and more about rivals? And at what cost to their future, when the lesson they carry into adulthood is that who they are will never be enough unless it comes with medals, contracts, or applause?

“Youth sports is a $19 billion industry in America, bigger than the NFL, and yet most of the players it feeds burn out before they ever hit college.”

The tragedy isn’t that we push kids to compete, it’s that we teach them winning is the only currency that buys them worth. And when that seed is planted early, it grows into a tree that shades every corner of their lives. Don’t even get me started on how social media compounds this (next article).

Now zoom out and education itself has been corrupted in similar ways. Once upon a time, education was meant to cultivate wisdom, to shape character, to develop a capacity for curiosity and critical thought. Before the industrialized reforms of the early 1900s, American education was more about becoming a thoughtful citizen than a compliant worker. Then came the factory model, rows of desks, standardized tests, bells that mimic factory whistles, obedience as a proxy for intelligence. We turned learning into another competition, GPAs, SAT scores, class ranks, metrics that reward memorization over meaning.

And just when you think we couldn’t commercialize it further, along comes the corporatization of college athletics. Universities, originally chartered as places of learning, now operate as sports franchises with billion-dollar budgets. Athletes, once “students first,” now earn paychecks and endorsement deals before they’ve even declared a major. Education becomes the backdrop, the sport becomes the show, and the contradiction could not be louder. What is the purpose of learning when the lesson is that your body is worth more than your mind?

“When love feels like a performance review, kids learn their worth is conditional.”

This is not a purist’s lament. I am not anti-sports, anti-competition, or anti-capitalism. I am anti-distortion. Competition has value when it sharpens us, when it pushes us beyond perceived limits, when it teaches us to collaborate and to sacrifice. But when it becomes the only measure, when every child is raised to believe their worth is tied to their ability to outperform, then we lose the plot. Collaboration dies. Curiosity dies. Meaning dies. And all that remains is the endless treadmill of proving yourself against the next opponent, until you forget why you were running in the first place.

“College athletics brings in $15 billion a year, but nearly one in three athletes report overwhelming anxiety.”

The paradox is that competition itself is not the villain, it is our worship of it. We forgot that collaboration is just as natural, just as ancient, just as necessary for survival. Indigenous societies knew this. Early educators knew this. Even the greatest teams in history knew this: that competition without collaboration is hollow, and collaboration without competition is stagnant. It is the dance between the two that makes progress possible.

So maybe the real question isn’t whether competition is good or bad. The question is…have we made competition into a god, and in doing so, forgotten that it was supposed to be a tool?

Because if we keep raising children to chase trophies without teaching them how to build, to share, to question, to listen, then we will end up with a society of winners who have forgotten what game they were even playing.

My Central Takeaway: Competition, at its best, should sharpen us, not define us. The solution isn’t to abandon it, but to rebalance it, to bring collaboration, curiosity, and meaning back into the mix. That shift begins with how we raise kids, how we structure education, and how we define success. The question worth asking isn’t “Did I win?” but “Did I grow, did I connect, did I contribute?”

Youth Sports & Burnout

• 70% of kids quit organized sports by age 13 — most cite pressure, lack of fun, or burnout as the reason. (Source: Aspen Institute Project Play, 2022)

• Kids in “highly competitive” youth leagues report double the rates of anxiety and depression compared to kids in recreational play. (Source: American Academy of Pediatrics, 2019)

• Overuse injuries account for nearly half of all youth sports injuries, often tied to year-round play and single-sport specialization. (Source: American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine, 2021)

  
  

Mental Health Impact

• NCAA data shows 30% of college athletes report overwhelming anxiety and 25% report depression, but less than half seek help. (Source: NCAA Student-Athlete Well-Being Study, 2022)

• A 2021 JAMA study found youth athletes under “parental performance pressure” were 3x more likely to develop long-term perfectionism traits linked to burnout and adult anxiety.

  
  

Financial Machine of Sports

• The youth sports industry in the U.S. is valued at $19.2 billion — larger than the NFL ($15 billion). (Source: WinterGreen Research, 2022)

• Parents spend an average of $883 per child, per year on youth sports, with some families spending upwards of $10,000 annually. (Source: Aspen Institute, 2022)

• College athletics generates over $15 billion annually in the U.S., with football and basketball driving the lion’s share. (Source: USA Today NCAA Finances Database)

• The global professional sports market topped $550 billion in 2024, projected to surpass $700 billion by 2026. (Source: Business Research Company, 2023)

  
  

Further Reading & Validation

Youth Sports Burnout

According to the National Alliance for Youth Sports, around 70% of kids quit organized sports by age 13, most often because the pressure to win stripped away the joy of playing.

Education & Competition

Research published in the Journal of Educational Psychology shows that students in collaborative environments retain information at significantly higher rates than those in competitive ones — collaboration enhances both performance and intrinsic motivation.

International Models

The OECD’s Education at a Glance report highlights that countries like Finland, which prioritize equity and collaboration over test-driven competition, consistently outperform more competitive models (including the U.S.) in literacy, numeracy, and overall student well-being.

Collaboration vs. Competition

A meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin (Johnson & Johnson, 2009) found that cooperative learning leads to higher achievement and healthier peer relationships than competitive or individualistic structures — suggesting that our obsession with being “the best” may actually undermine growth.

About Deevo

Deevo is not your guru, and thank God for that. He’s not here to sell you the latest five-step funnel or whisper corporate-approved mantras about “authenticity” while holding a ring light. He’s the guy who walked out of corporate not because he hated it, he was good at it, he thrived in it, but because his soul finally screamed louder than the paycheck.

Since then, he’s built and burned and rebuilt more businesses than most people have résumés. He grew one of the busiest photography studios in the Southeast, sold a sports league with 15,000 members, raised two daughters solo, and then decided none of it mattered if he couldn’t answer the only question that counts: Who the hell are you, really?

That question has become his life’s work. Today, Deevo helps founders, leaders, and creatives strip away the polish, the posturing, and the performance so they can finally see themselves clearly, and then build a brand, a business, and a life from that truth. His coaching is equal parts excavation and ignition: part strategist, part mirror, part philosopher, part smart-ass.

Clients come to him thinking they need better messaging or sharper marketing. They leave realizing what they actually needed was themselves.

Because at the end of the day, branding isn’t logos and hashtags. It’s identity work. It’s remembering who you are, reprogramming the bullshit you’ve been carrying, and showing up in the world aligned enough that people feel it before you even say a word. That’s the brand. That’s the work. And Deevo lives it with a messy kind of conviction that makes you believe maybe you could, too.