Competition.

There has been a sudden swell of competitive spirit around me these days. My PhD office-mates started a "Winning Board" on our communal blackboard, where we each get a little icon and a tally mark if we get a "win", meaning we accomplish something awesome. Most wins are compliments from our supervisors, publications, getting student visas approved, etc (though some people's wins include getting a cool Band-Aid from the Emergency Room when she crashed her bike, or being mistaken for another student who is considered very hot). Pretty significant stuff. And supposedly you have to be nominated for a win by another student, to avoid false self-declared wins.
While I thought drawing our identity icons was cute (mine is, what else, a dinosaur) and I love using blackboards (which were the topic of my master's thesis), I hate the Winning Board. It's supposed to be a mode of recognition for achievement, since PhD students get very little feedback and even less positive feedback. But it's turned out to inspire competition among us... how ridiculous is that? We are all dangling from the bottom rung of the academic ladder, desperately struggling to join the actual academic hierarchy - so why on earth would we compete with each other? More importantly, why should we care what our fellow students think of us, when it's our superiors' opinions that actually matter? We should be helping each other, not counting who has the most wins each morning.
I suggested a communal Winning Board, with tally marks for everyone's wins combined with no names, but that got vetoed. So currently I have the least number of wins - 2 - because I refuse to play. I don't want my wins to be on show for public approval - I want internal motivation! And the 2 wins I do have are for 1) not having any wins (lame), and 2) for organizing a PhD Writing Group, which did deserve a win, if I do say so myself. But that was also a move to combat this growing culture of bragging and asking each other how many words we wrote today or how many publications we have or even how old we are... things that I think are irrelevant to our academic success and identity.
So the result has become that I don't tell anyone that I've started running again and miraculously haven't hurt my ankles, because that would inspire the response of "oh yeah, well I went to the gym every day last week" with a "so there" tone. I can't even seem to tell them what I did over the weekend without ticking off somebody else's ego and competitive spirit. So I don't tell them that my second real journal article is coming out soon, or that I got lovely feedback from my students, or that living in my new house is wonderful, or that I'm dating a boy who is "winning" oh so much more than any of them and somehow he thinks that I am too. I don't want tick marks, or my classmates' approval, to measure my success.
(But I do, apparently, need to talk about it on a blog. Isn't it ironic...)