Paper

Competition has taken on a new context than in the past. It previously had a connotation with a means of survival; the competition for food, the competition for mates and reproduction, the competition of space, etc. Its original context still exists today, but it is not as prevalent. Competition, in today’s context, is the fight to have your attention.
That said, today's competitions revolve around your choice of Vidal Sassoon or Pantene Protein, to gain your vote for the new City Commissioner, to gain your signature for the petition against a new parking garage, or to expose you to new ‘valuable’ information. The competition to capture your attention is centered completely around you, or at least your attention.
So why do we even submit our attention and our concentration to this hunger-deprived competition? It has become an act of validating ourselves or to gain a sense of belonging in our society. It’s as though the role of validation was reversed from us finding our sense of being, to the validation of a product, a cause, or the existence of information. Or in another sense, competition originally was for us to make a positive gain as opposed to losing it to the competitor.
This competition of all these different voices is a bombardment on you; the self. These voices “becomes a part of us and we a part of them (Gergen).” There is so much exposure to choices, information, values, and voices that it’s almost impossible to differentiate among them in order to create a concrete, constant, identity. Through technological advancements, it’s been incredibly effortless to expose our population to similar information, values, and voices. Since our population is absorbing the same information collectively, we are forming a homogenized identity, or no identity; like a flock of birds all going and coming from the same place.
It would be inappropriate to dismiss the technological advancements that have made this phenomenon so widespread. It began with the written word. It allowed one to write so that it could be persevered for time. The spread of the word exploded with the invention of the printing press; suddenly words could exist in multiple places at times. The ability to be in multiple places at multiple times is referred to by Gergen as multiphrenia. As modes of mass transportation and communication became more commonplace, the transference of written material was easier. The speed of dispersal of homogeneous ideas to many people increased with the advent of new communication technologies like the radio, then the telephone, the television, and finally the Internet.

Originally, we were concerned with the competition for your attention. However, since we submitted our attention, we are now concerned about the competition of voices and options within ourselves. How do we decipher all the information that we have received? How do we choose amongst the competing voices?
Let’s take a very simple example of Schwartz’s crisis of choice of jeans to undermine the difficulty of choice in identity.
At the Gap, you can find women’s jeans that are long and lean, curvy, low-rise bootcut, mid-rise bootcut, essential, straight, trouser, skinny, cropped, or capri. Not to mention you also have the choice of dark wash, medium wash, indigo wash, light wash, colored, distressed along with the choice of length. Let’s say after much trial and error of jean fitting, you find yourself deeply satisfied with a pair of mid-rise bootcut, dark washed, long jeans.
However, even though you have found yourself a great looking pair of jeans that are perfect for you, Schwartz states, that you will find yourself very dissatisfied later on because the rise in jean options has resulted a raise of your expectations. Your expectation has developed into jeans being only worthy if form-fitting. Otherwise they will be disappointing. This disappointment arises because your previously exalted expectations of jeans has faded, whether it is because of their faded satisfaction they had given you at first or because of the new change in jean fashion. Mind you, that if we were to add another ‘fit’ to jean categories at the Gap, the number of combinations will rise exponentially as well as your expectations. "Faced with this inevitable disappointment, what do people do? Some simply give up the chase and stop valuing pleasure derived from things. Most are driven instead to pursue novelty, to seek out new commodities and experiences whose pleasure potential has not been dissipated by repeated exposure. In time, these new commodities also will lose their intensity, but people get caught up in the chase, process that psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell labeled the hedonic treadmill. No matter how fast you run on this kind of machine, you still don't get anywhere (Schwartz)."

Once we redirect the jean example of rational decision-making back to competition of identity forming, the degree in which the choice holds has altered. The plethora of information and choices that constitute something, such as a moral dilemma, has become increasingly more difficult to tackle. It would only be rational to filter your options in order to find a perfect fit to the problem. Somehow, you find yourself contemplating many potential solutions. Only during certain situations do any of the potential solutions make sense.
Therefore, the most logical conclusion is depending on the context of a situation, the context determines how one filters information. One is no longer looking for the perfect choice, but the perfect choices (Gladwell).
To find the perfect choices, one needs to consider different contexts in which to make the perfect choices. So the perfect choice can only be made in its perfect corresponding context.
This means that the solving of a moral dilemma is more dependent on the context of which the moral dilemma is in rather than the moral dilemma itself. The context determines how one filters the relevant information that will respond accordingly. As there is a large array of contexts to be considered, in turn, there is a large array of rationalizations to identify with. These rationalizations, of course, depend on the context. By one being the owner of these different rationalizations, a pastiche identity is born (Gergen).
Nobody has to commit to any one identity anymore, since the context and information is so vast and ever changing. "Commitment used to mean for better or for worse, now it means throw myself into something and hope for that it works out (de Zengotita)." Whatever means we use to make a decision, we never fully have to commit to it anymore because we can redefine ourselves later on.
Currently, we are seeing a trend of ourselves so overwhelmed and eroded by the continuous stream of change and filtration that we either become helpless creatures or we just don’t care; “having seen it all before, one approaches a state of boredom (Gergen).” Thus one resorts the shoulder shrug of becoming a helpless creature to the process or just saying ‘whatever.’

The beginning of this paper stated that competition was centered around us and our attention, and we end up not caring. In the pursuit to progress as better humans, with high expectations, we have regressed, or as Gergen calls pregression. We have become upset or disappointed after the enduring and frustrating process of filtration. We started as people who wanted an identity that made us essentially happy, but were derived from that initial path onto an intricate road. Our pursuit of happiness has turned into a rationalization to progress when it once was a philosophical phrase that was not bound to the rules of rational.

As the context of competition changed to compete for your attention, the boom of voices and information was transferred through all the technological advances of the century. Unless information is worthy of your attention, it does not fall into one’s filtration process. Since we are constantly filtering information and identities based on the context in which we are in, identity is always and never is a consistent entity. The self at no one point can be identified because it is governed by its context. Due to the constant filtration and reframing of one’s environment, humans have pregressed to a point of submission where they no longer acknowledge and resort to a careless ‘whatever’ shrug. This all follows a line of rational, but it leaves us unhappy and dissatisfied in the end.

Gergen, Kenneth. The Saturated Self. 1991
Gladwell, Malcom. TED Talk: What we can learn from spaghetti. 2004
Schwartz, Barry. The Paradox of Choice. 2004
Schwartz, Barry. TED Talk: The Paradox of Choice. 2004
de Zengotita, Thomas. Mediated. 2005