Happy Compared to Whom?
Keeping score is a defining characteristic of contemporary societies. Civilization, itself, breeds continual tension between human cooperation and competition. Samuel Bowles (2006) explicitly asserts that our evolutionary success required "intense intergroup competition ...in the interest of avoiding group (and hence individual and family) annihilation in the context of intergroup aggression (warfare)." Fortunately, for most of us, 21st century success rarely is a matter of "annihilation". Cooperation and competition are not tooth and claw, life and death struggles. We usually choose when and how to compete --discretionary competitions that depend on what we define as important and unimportant. And those definitions are mostly determined by the ways that we perceive interpersonal issues. For many people, athletes embody competition, and they self-define similarly. We hear them say, "I love this game. I'd play for free. I love the battles."...