This morning I am thinking about competition’s price.

Competition pushes us forward, motivates us to work harder and to seek that competitive edge, that special something that separates the winners from the losers. The will to win is what makes Olympic athletes, and Fortune 500 CEOs, and America — particularly Donald Trump’s America. And as long as you are one of the people born with the opportunity to be a winner — someone with the physical gifts that an athlete needs, or with the background and connections to network your way to the top of a major corporation, or you happened to control half a continent with an embarrassment of natural riches, which was conveniently emptied of 95% of its population by disease just before you arrived to take over, well! Then competition can help you strive to achieve all of your potential, can create a situation where you can be dominant and reward you for that dominance. Competition can make you great.

But there’s a price. There’s always a price. Capitalism should have taught us that: there is no such thing as a free lunch. Somebody always has to pay. We think that the price we pay for winning is the hard work we put in to be the best, but that’s not it: that’s the labor that produces the end result, but it isn’t the cost of the raw materials, and it isn’t the waste that is left behind. Before I lose you with this oh-so-clever industrial metaphor (Which, I confess, is essayed with only the dimmest understanding of economics and industry, at least half garnered from civilization-simulator video games) let me make my point: the cost of competition is twofold. It consumes the soul of the winner, and the life of the loser.

Competition requires an environment where competition can thrive. That means it needs a contest, an opportunity for too many people to struggle for too few resources (Or, in the modern sportsing era where athletes “earn” the GDP of a small nation every year, it is too many people struggling for too many resources which are all consumed by one enormous glutton rather than being distributed to all in need) and for the possession of those resources to be claimed by the winner of the contest. This quite obviously hearkens back to natural selection, the struggle for survival, which also produces winners and losers — or, more appropriately, those who live and those who die. Competition takes that same instinct and channels it into a situation that is not life or death, with essentially the same result: all else being equal, those with greater determination win — the early bird gets the worm — but inevitably, those with the greatest adaptive advantages are selected. You can see it in sports, where athletes are bigger and stronger and faster than ever before.

But even more than that, for our strongest to survive in competitions, we have to train them, essentially from birth, to compete. Tiger Woods is a perfect example of this: he was raised, quite literally, to win. And so he won, and now he is back to winning, and I suppose that gives his life meaning and makes all his effort worthwhile. But look at the cost: look at the rest of his life. The man has destroyed his own family life; he has ravaged his standing and reputation in society in every way other than what standing he gets from the fact that he can hit tiny white rocks really, really far with a metal stick; he has damaged his body nearly to the point of crippling himself; he has struggled with substance abuse.

That’s what it looks like when you’re the best.

I mean, it makes sense. If you are raised and bred to compete, then you would be likely to compete in everything. Having just one wife wouldn’t be enough: you have to have the best wife, the hottest wife; and then you need more wives. Getting high isn’t enough, you have to be the highest in the history of highness: you have to beat out such luminaries as Snoop Dogg and Bob Marley, and when you try to hang with those guys, it’s gonna cost you. And when you aren’t gifted with a freakishly impossible advantage (That would be Shaquille O’Neal, who didn’t have to work hard to be successful, simply because nobody else in the basketball world was that big. Andre the Giant, as well.), then the cost of beating out other people with the same gifts you have is — well, whatever it takes. Sacrificing every other part of your life so you can get in more training is only the first step: after that comes cheating, and doping, and Lance Armstrong, who was gifted with natural ability (His lungs are preternaturally efficient, allowing him to move more oxygen and therefore put out greater physical effort for longer — like, say, when you’re riding a bike uphill) and a drive to win, and who still used performance enhancing drugs. And also ruined his otherwise successful life thereby. Of course, he wouldn’t have had that successful life if he hadn’t won, but it’s hardly his fault that our culture rewards only the first person across the finish line; I don’t doubt that Armstrong could have been top ten in every Tour he won, even without the walrus testosterone or whatever the hell he stuck in his veins.

And that’s the final cost. Competition may make winners: but it also therefore makes losers. And everything that winners gain, losers — well, lose. And the very nature of competition requires that loss to hurt, because otherwise the losers won’t strive to become winners. So at best, with only two people competing, competition creates as much overall suffering as it does overall reward. But of course there’s never only two competitors: which means that inevitably, in all cases, competition makes more suffering than reward. Competition hurts us. Always. Even, I would argue, those who do win, because at some point, no matter who you are, you stop winning. Athletes retire, companies get eclipsed by new up-and-comers or by simple shifts in the economy or the culture, and nations — no matter how great — fade and fall. Competition makes losers of all of us. That’s the price.