Quitting the external reward system
Success doesn’t come from within; it’s given to you by other people, and other people can take it away. In part, this is why I stopped competing. I didn’t want to perform the flow for points any more.
I recently read and loved Even if you beat me by Sally Rooney, in which she documents her own experience in competitive debating, and her feelings and thoughts from the beginning to the end.
We’ve all played (and probably also quit) certain games that we deeply care about. Those games are usually constructed by some external reward systems: institutions that validate our worth through records and rankings. Social communities like schools, societies, and cultures invent these games for us, and we tell ourselves stories about why they matter and how our sense of meaning and worth is tied to our performance within them.
In this sense, I see Sally Rooney’s precise and detailed recounting of her ambitions, striving and disillusionment in competitive debating as a metaphor that extends beyond debating. To me, her story is about realizing one’s self-worth is independent of the external reward system, and quitting it to preserve what truly matters, which in her case, is the sense of flow.
She describes the flavor of competitive debates: “You need to have a taste for ritualized, abstract interpersonal aggression. You have to be willing to tolerate physical and mental discomfort. And you have to learn how to lose.”
At nineteen, she admits “most things I did were motivated by a desperation to be liked.” In the debates community, popularity equals success. It’s a social game with clear rules, which she observed and thought that she could play to be one of the best. “I had low self-esteem and a predilection for hero-worship, and I was extremely determined.” Hence she got into the game of debating competitively.
She enjoyed the flow state during debates—“Hitting that perfect rhythm while speaking, connecting concept to response, drawing examples out of thin air. Complex things become simple.”
When she started debating, her style was seen as passionate and forceful. Yet, she didn’t want to debate to show passion—she wanted to win while staying detached and cerebral.
“Imagine if all conflict was like this: you don’t have to get upset or angry, everyone will listen to you even if they don’t want to, and at the end of the discussion a nice man with a British accent will tell you that the game is over now and you’ve won. I think in a way it was this fantasy of invulnerability, of total control, that made me keep returning, weekend after weekend. All the pleasures of conflict without ever really showing my hand.”
She is aware of how womanhood is perceived in that male-dominated arena: “… where aloofness in men is seen as mysterious, in women it’s seen as cold. If you’re a girl, judges don’t just want to know you’re smart; they want to know you care.”
She writes about feeling embarrassed by her success and learning to deflect praise by crediting it to her male teammates and coach.
Throughout this article, she uses words like “performance”, “pretending”, “accumulating points”, and “game” to describe her debating experience, which indicates that she has grown to be aloof with that activity by the time she’s writing the article.
“‘Anything can be great,’ Fast Eddie says. ‘I don’t care, bricklaying can be great.’ But you don’t lay bricks with the intention of accumulating a record number of points, and you certainly don’t do it to attain some kind of phony celebrity. For flow to be authentic, it has to be for its own sake. The ego has to fall away. This is not so difficult when you’re immersed in the task itself; but when the task is over, all you have left is a list of accomplishments. So maybe for a while you start believing there’s something great about those.”
As a game, competitive debating was fun for her, and she enjoyed the flow and the feeling of leveling up. But after she has established herself among debaters, she became more aware of what comes after the accomplishments. She didn’t cope well with being constantly evaluated by others and being rewarded based on an external value system. It was clear to her that the flow state was induced by the pressure to perform for the judges, to accumulate points, and to prove one’s intelligence. It felt empty when one is expressing an argument arduously while not meaning any bit of what one claims.
“Competitive debating takes argument’s essential features and reimagines them as a game. For the purposes of this game, the emotional or relational aspects of argument are superfluous, and at the end there are winners. Everyone tacitly understands that it’s not a real argument.”
She also mentioned feeling uncomfortable debating serious topics (such as war or oppression) in a detached, competitive context. Skillfully winning the game while being ignorant of the topic felt unauthentic and amoral to her.
So she quit the game. The flow state became too intertwined with success defined by an external reward system, and she didn’t want it to be disrupted or taken away by others. “Success doesn’t come from within; it’s given to you by other people, and other people can take it away. In part, this is why I stopped competing. I didn’t want to give up the feeling of flow, that perfect, self-eliminating focus, but I didn’t want to perform it for points any more. Maybe I stopped debating to see if I could still think of things to say when there weren’t any prizes.”
The ending is very strong and powerful—she grew out of her low self-esteem and the tendency to deflect the praise.
“But I did it. I got everything I set out to get. I was the one delivering the offhanded refutation. It was me sipping water while I waited for the end of the applause. I still occasionally feel an impulse to attribute all my achievements that year to my perfect teammate, or worse, to good luck. But I’m not nineteen anymore; I don’t need to make people feel comfortable. In the end, it was me. It may not mean anything to anyone else, but it doesn’t have to – that’s the point. I was number one. Like Fast Eddie, I’m the best there is. And even if you beat me, I’m still the best.”
She played well in this game. But the point isn’t about seeking external validation, which feels hollow once achieved. Instead, it’s about recognizing that one’s self-worth exists independently of any external reward system.
Some remarks:
All interpretations are my own. The original story may not intend to reach this far. I’m partly using Sally Rooney’s story as a tool, or as an example, to explore the idea of quitting an external reward system and establishing one’s own self-worth independent of that system.
Many of us might resonate with the societal pressure to conform to external standards, but quitting is not the only response. In this piece, the decision to quit was driven by her desire to preserve the authenticity of her flow state and detach from external validation, but this motivation is deeply personal and subjective.
Had she not been successful in debating, would the message still stand? The narrative would certainly be different. Not everyone is a winner who can ace the game and quit it with pride. Are there other ways by which people can exit the external system gracefully?