I cannot pinpoint the day or year or decade when competitiveness became a meter for success rather than autonomy. In modern society, youths think of themselves as one of many, and struggle to represent themselves outwardly to distinguish themselves from their peers. This impedes any sincere self-exploration; the idleness that once allowed us to find our own channels of thoughts, interests, passions has been replaced by the work of partaking in activities we believe to paint an accurate, or more aptly desirable, image of our identity. This becomes a lifestyle, from a very young age we are taught to “resumé-pack” and our resumé is our identity. What a deplorable notion, that the language in which we communicate with society is a falsified version of a sense of self that would collapse under any real self-examination. I call this a macro-scale, an identity composed of credentials which determines how adequate we are. It is a macro scale because it makes sense only in communication with society at large. Any authentic sense of self that can be developed between hours dedicated to the arduous task of the resumé-packing lifestyle contributes to our communication in the micro-scale; the genuine interactions between friends, loved ones, and people to whom we are important or who are important to us. As we grow up in this societal climate, the macro-scale begins to corrode the micro-scale. We become our credentials, and any who place more importance on authenticity become rejects or unsuccessful.

I do not advocate inflated self-importance, but I yearn for and am in awe of the days when humans had a healthy sense of autonomy and based their decisions on who they believed themselves to be rather than their desired caricature. No wonder many young people strain and break and are washed away by the pressure of the unhealthily competitive environment of the modern education system. I only hope that one day, this can lead to a revolutionized concept of what determines human value, and a breaking away from the systems which strive to demystify and delineate us.