There’s a peculiar frustration that comes from trying to outdo someone who doesn’t even know you’re competing with them. You’re running full speed, calculating every move, measuring every achievement against theirs, while they’re simply walking their own path, oblivious to the race you’ve constructed in your mind.
This is the fundamental paradox of one-sided competition: you cannot win a game that only exists for you.I’ve watched this play out countless times. Someone becomes obsessed with surpassing a colleague, outdoing a friend, or proving themselves against a peer who isn’t paying attention. They exhaust themselves chasing benchmarks the other person never set. They celebrate victories the other person doesn’t notice. They suffer defeats in a tournament with only one participant.
The person you’re competing against wakes up thinking about their own goals, their own growth, their own definition of success. They’re not checking your progress or comparing their achievements to yours. They’re not keeping score because they don’t know there’s a game happening. And that’s precisely why you can’t beat them at it.
When you compete with someone who isn’t competing back, you’re essentially shadow boxing. Every punch you throw meets no resistance because there’s no opponent standing there. Every strategy you devise goes unanswered because there’s no counter-strategy being formed. You’re playing chess against an empty chair, declaring checkmate to no one.
The energy required to maintain a one-sided competition is enormous. You have to fuel both sides of the rivalry yourself. You have to imagine their moves, project their motivations, interpret their actions as competitive responses when they’re really just living their lives. You become both competitor and competitor’s keeper, exhausting yourself in a role they never asked you to play.
What makes this particularly draining is that the other person’s indifference isn’t a strategy. They’re not playing it cool or pretending not to care. They genuinely aren’t in competition with you because they’re focused on something entirely different. Maybe they’re competing with their past self. Maybe they’re not competing at all, just creating, exploring, or existing. Their lack of engagement isn’t a power move; it’s simply their reality.
Meanwhile, you’re building an elaborate scoreboard that only you can see. You’re tracking metrics they don’t value, celebrating wins they wouldn’t recognize as victories, and suffering losses they would never frame as defeats. You’ve created an entire competitive framework around someone who’s operating in a completely different paradigm.
The truth is, competition requires mutual participation to have any meaning. Sports need opposing teams. Debates need counterarguments. Races need runners who acknowledge the starting line. Without that reciprocal engagement, what you have isn’t competition but obsession dressed up in competitive language.
This doesn’t mean ambition is wrong or that healthy competition can’t be motivating. When both parties are engaged, competition can drive innovation, excellence, and growth. But when you’re competing with someone who isn’t competing back, you’re not being driven forward by rivalry. You’re being pulled sideways by comparison, trapped in a cycle of measuring yourself against someone who’s measuring themselves by completely different standards.
The person who isn’t mentally in competition with you has already won, not because they beat you, but because they were never playing your game to begin with. They’ve won by opting out, by refusing to let external comparison dictate their path, by focusing their energy on their own journey rather than on outpacing yours.
The only way to truly compete with someone who isn’t competing is to stop competing. Redirect that energy inward. Race against your own potential. Measure yourself against your own progress. Build something meaningful rather than something better than theirs. Because at the end of the day, the most exhausting competition is the one where you’re the only person who cares about the outcome.
When you finally let go of competing with the uninterested, something remarkable happens: you stop running someone else’s race and start walking your own path. And you might discover that the journey is far more interesting when you’re no longer checking over your shoulder to see where they are.
