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Victory
4 min read · 798 words
Victory is the configuration in which the inhabitant has prevailed in a contest, achieved an outcome that was being competed for, or reached a goal that involved opposition. The configuration carries different properties than achievement that did not involve contest.
The hardware was tuned to register victory differently from neutral achievement. The dopaminergic response, the elevated mood, the status signal to other people, the felt sense of dominance — these are calibrated to the contest configuration. The system that registered victory strongly was better motivated to engage future contests. The operator who won the conflict, the competition, the negotiation, the comparison received a more substantial reward signal than the operator who simply completed a non-competitive operation of equivalent difficulty.
This was sensibly calibrated for an environment in which contests were rare and consequential. In the modern environment they are constant and often trivial — and the reward circuitry, which cannot tell the difference, fires for both.
THE ABUNDANCE OF CHEAP VICTORIES
The modern environment offers many opportunities for victory configurations and few that warrant the response intensity the hardware delivers.
The minor work competition. The argument the inhabitant prevailed in. The status comparison the inhabitant emerged ahead in. The contest of opinion on the device that the inhabitant’s position dominated. Each fires some version of the victory response. The cumulative effect is inhabitants who pursue victory configurations as the primary reward structure, often at substantial cost in other domains — substantial portions of the day spent winning small arguments with strangers in order to feel briefly significant.
ORGANIZING LIFE AROUND VICTORY
The inhabitant experiences life as continuous contest, treats collaborative configurations as competitions, treats relationships as situations to prevail in.
The configuration produces brief victory states regularly. It also damages the relationships, collaborations, and conditions the inhabitant’s life actually depends on. The pursuit of victory is its own habit, with substantial costs the inhabitant may not register because the brief reward signals keep arriving and obscuring what is eroding underneath.
The other people in the room can usually feel this configuration before the inhabitant can name it. They tend not to mention it. They tend, eventually, to be elsewhere.
REFUSING ALL CONTEST AS EGO
The opposite failure mode.
Some situations are genuinely competitive. The inhabitant who refuses to engage them loses ground that engagement would have held. The framing that all competition is to be transcended often produces inhabitants who get steadily displaced by others who do engage the contests — and who then frame the displacement as evidence of how unfair the system was. The framing is partially correct and conveniently exempts the inhabitant from having tried.
ASSESSING THE CURRENT RELATIONSHIP
Is the inhabitant pursuing victory configurations excessively, in domains where they are not warranted, at cost to other operations? Or refusing engagement that warrants it, ceding ground that should not be ceded?
The honest assessment usually surfaces which is currently running — sometimes both, in different domains, in the same inhabitant. The inhabitant chasing trivial victories online while ceding the actually competitive professional ground is a common configuration.
ADDRESSING EXCESSIVE PURSUIT
What underlying conditions are producing it?
Often the pattern traces to inadequate other sources of standing or worth, with victory configurations being run as substitute. The intervention that addresses the underlying condition reduces the pursuit. The intervention that only addresses the surface behavior often produces displacement to other compensatory configurations — the inhabitant stops chasing one kind of victory and starts chasing another. The hunger underneath does not care which contests it is being fed through.
RECEIVING VICTORIES WITHOUT INFLATING
The victory configuration produces a brief reward state. The brief state is real and limited.
The inhabitant who experiences the victory and returns to the work has integrated it appropriately. The inhabitant who tries to extend the victory state, replay it, perform it for others to extract additional reward, is asking the configuration to do more than it can do — and usually produces effects that diminish what the victory itself contained. The win that gets told too many times becomes embarrassing to have been a win at all.
HOW VICTORIES LAND FOR OTHERS
The inhabitant’s victory often involves another person’s defeat.
The way the inhabitant carries victory — with care for the other, with restraint in display, with attention to the relationship that will continue after the contest — affects substantially what the victory eventually produces. The victory that damaged the relationship beyond what the contest warranted often costs more than it returned. The spike-the-football habit produces a brief reward and a long memory in the person who was on the receiving end.
The configuration is brief. The inhabitant who registers it appropriately and returns to operation does better than the one who tries to make it the operating mode.