What happened to the glory of being number one?

I grew up in a school system that rewards the highest score achiever every semester. On holidays, I watched Japanese sports anime across fields, from a football player, a mini-car racer, to Pokémon trainer whose aim is to be the number one in the world. In a more chaotic alternate universe, still, Naruto wants to be Hokage, and Luffy wants to be the Pirate King. 

I used to be a firm believer of this. I started with the aim to be the best in my class, but I was always humbled by a lot of defeats. There were times when I fell sick, so I couldn't give my best during the exam, and even when the three best students from my school were put together in a team, we still got defeated by other schools. 

Despite being punched by tons of defeats, it took a long time until they managed to humble me. I used to take my defeat as a closed door. If these doors are closed, then this is not my way of becoming the best. I will then take a detour to look around if there is any door I can still push, but aiming to be the best is a non-negotiable. 

I admired my persistence, but it was so damn exhausting. I also feel that I was a few steps distanced from my surroundings every time I won. I can't help but feel better than the others in such a situation, and it led me to a strange guilt I didn't fully understand. One day, when I was receiving my trophy for being one of the best score achievers in elementary school, a mother of my friend jokingly said, "We all chipped in for the class treasury, but it's only you who got the trophy every year." That simple tease amplified my guilt. What was even more dangerous was how I was bestowed with the title of number 1 or 2, or 3 student. Here I paraphrase it as the best score achiever, but at that time, it was really just "the best student". For every trophy I collected, the more I was afraid of falling. When I could not give my best, I felt immense guilt. When I got defeated, I needed to have something to blame. It took me a long time to realize that life is more packed with defeats than it is with victories. It was not until recently that I tried to appreciate what I have done and how much I have learned, despite the result. Now I am still struggling to unlearn this urge to be the best and finding the healthier interpretation of "living my life to the fullest".

The Western world loves this predicate of being the best at something. They invented Guinness World Records, Michelin stars, the Olympics, the FIFA World Cup, and the Nobel. They love to arrange people in order, especially regarding putting Western countries at the first of the list. I spent all my childhood years brooding about how my large and populous country is nowhere to be found in all of those lists. I thought this was due to our backwardness. So to me, being the best was partly patriotic. To soar up from my little town to Europe was almost a sacred life mission of lifting up my society. Little did I know, just as winning a trophy is not the answer to making my life meaningful, being on par with Western countries is also not the way to make everyone in my country live a better life. 

Now I am doing a PhD that questions what a good life used to look like in pre-modern times. It's a hilarious irony. It was the "best student" side in me who pushed me up here, and now my main quest is basically to argue that being the best (with perpetual growth) is not the answer to happiness. I believe that my older obsession with Western countries was the path God purposely took me through. Just when I was exhausted from my ambitious life, when I questioned my capabilities after all my plans failed, I landed on an opportunity to carry out a project I developed from my own story, and I happened to do it while the decades-old (at least) American propaganda was crumbling down. In 2018, we were flocking to the cinema every two or three months to see the newest release of American superhero franchises, oblivious to or at least taking lightly the racial propaganda neatly tailored within them. For decades, we struggled to relate to movie leads played by white actors, thinking that maybe our "kinds of life" could only be portrayed in a comedic way, where the laugh is on us. 

Now, as the power was dispersed to more hotspots, especially Asians, we were being open to more than one way of life. We see the differences between the American and European West, even between Northern and Southern Europeans. We also see how Asian products, to a certain extent, speak more volume to us than the Western ones. We started to see the world as nodes that connected to one another, as cosmopolites influencing and being influenced simultaneously, instead of a linear competition.

That being said, to me, the flashy title of the first man on the moon or first woman in space in 2025 is really an outdated joke, especially if you get it from a billionaire-owned space tourism company. If it were an organic experience as an astronaut, I think one being finally sent out to space would be humble enough to say that it was not a personal success. From an anime called Space Brothers, I learned about the lengthy and laborious process of being sent into space, and the part when you are finally launched is just a tiny bit of what your life there actually means. The space race itself was also an ambitious idea born in the expendable competition between the US and Russia during the Cold War. One more reason why competition is, on a lot of occasions, unhealthy.

In the 1980s, when people tried to justify Neoliberalism, they summoned back the classical idea that inequality was necessary to spark competition. The classical economy, and again the neoliberal economy, saw competition as a natural mechanism for efficiency and innovation. Now that I think about it this way, it became clear why my generation was being raised through competition. The unhealthy urge of becoming the number one in the world, the distance that we draw from our surroundings every time we win, and individual success are all maybe neoliberal logics. Now look at Tony Stark, a guy I used to see as cool due to his wit and quirks. He is just someone with generational wealth and immense power who wishes to remold the world to his favor. Does it ring a bell?