Crickets & Frogs
I recently came across a children's book by Gabriela Mistral called Crickets and Frogs. The story involves a wonderfully simple competition between crickets and frogs over who can make the most noise.
I had already been considering a similar title for something entirely unrelated. The coincidence caught my attention. Humans make a lot of noise too, and much like the crickets and frogs, we seem remarkably concerned with whether anyone hears us. Perhaps the more interesting question is why.
Human beings possess an extraordinary need to matter. We want to know that our existence has significance, that our efforts have value, that someone notices when we succeed, and that our presence makes some difference in the world. That need is seemingly not as important to the wildebeest or the gazelle.
Certainly, animals compete. They fight for territory, resources, mates, position, and survival. Many social animals establish hierarchies and recognize dominance. We should be careful pretending we know what another creature experiences internally, yet there appears to be something particularly human about our ability to turn those basic drives into questions about ourselves. We do not merely lose; we can feel humiliated. We do not merely lack something; we can feel deprived. We can observe another person's success and interpret it as evidence of our own failure, or experience criticism not merely as disagreement but as an attack upon who we believe ourselves to be.
Perhaps our primal minds did not disappear as our awareness increased. Perhaps greater awareness simply gave those instincts more places to go. We still compete for resources, mates, security, territory, position, attention, and belonging, but now we can remember yesterday, anticipate tomorrow, compare ourselves with people we have never met, replay an insult from twenty years ago, imagine what others think about us, and construct elaborate explanations for why we deserve more than we have. We can even think about what we think other people think about us. That is quite a burden to place on an animal.
Somewhere within all of this is ego. Ego itself does not have to be the villain. We need a sense of self and enough belief in our own importance to protect ourselves, express ourselves, pursue our interests, and believe our lives are worth improving. Without some degree of self-esteem and self-confidence, it would be difficult to accomplish much of anything.
The problem may be ego taken out of context. There is a considerable difference between believing I matter and believing I matter more than everyone else. Wanting recognition for something I have accomplished is different from believing recognition is owed to me simply because I want it. Wanting what another person has is also very different from being willing to do what they did to obtain it.
The human need to matter can push us in remarkably different directions. It can make someone practice an instrument for twenty years, get up before sunrise to train, build a company, write a book, learn a trade, raise a family, earn a degree, master a craft, serve a community, or spend a lifetime becoming better at something few people will ever notice. The desire to matter can produce discipline, perseverance, accomplishment, and contribution.
It can also produce entitlement.
Someone else may have something we want. They may have worked for it, sacrificed for it, failed repeatedly while pursuing it, or spent years developing an ability we admire. We can look at that person and allow their accomplishment to challenge us to improve, or we can decide that what they have is unfair, undeserved, or somehow something to which we are equally entitled. The first response can turn competition into motivation. The second can turn competition into resentment.
Sometimes another person's success forces us to confront not what they have done, but what we haven't. Their accomplishment can become evidence of what may have been possible through greater effort, discipline, sacrifice, persistence, or willingness to take risks. That can be uncomfortable. It may be easier to bring someone else's achievement down to a level we can understand than to raise our understanding of what their achievement required. We can explain their success as luck, privilege, connections, greed, obsession, or something undeserved. Sometimes those explanations will be true. But there is a difference between examining the circumstances that contributed to another person's success and needing an explanation for their success that protects us from examining ourselves.
Competition itself is not necessarily destructive. Much of human progress has been driven by people trying to do something better, faster, stronger, safer, more efficiently, or more beautifully than someone else. Competition can expose our weaknesses and force us to improve. There is an enormous difference, however, between wanting to surpass another person and wanting to diminish them. One response requires us to become better. The other merely requires the other person to become smaller.
The result may depend upon something less exciting than ambition or talent: self-management. Self-confidence without self-management can become arrogance. Ambition without discipline can become entitlement. Competition without respect can become destruction. Desire without restraint can become obsession. Self-esteem without context can become self-importance. The underlying energy found in passion may not be particularly different. What changes is what we do with it.
Perhaps this is one of the peculiar consequences of being human. Our higher awareness gives us tremendous abilities, but it also gives our emotions somewhere to expand. Fear can grow into anxiety about events that have never occurred. Embarrassment can remain with us as shame. Competition can become envy, confidence can become superiority, and desire can become obsession. A moment of rejection can become a story we tell ourselves for decades. We possess the unusual ability to take an immediate feeling and build an identity around it.
Yet that same awareness gives us the ability to move in the other direction. We can recognize what we are feeling, question why we are feeling it, consider the consequences of acting upon it, and decide what we are going to do next. That may be where discipline and self-management become more than productivity tools. They become mechanisms through which a human being governs the forces occurring within the self.
The goal is not necessarily to eliminate ego, competition, ambition, desire, or the need to matter. Those forces have contributed too much to human achievement to dismiss them simply as defects. The person who wants to accomplish something significant probably needs to believe, at least somewhat, that they are capable of significance. The more important question is whether that belief remains in context.
I can matter without requiring you to matter less. I can succeed without needing you to fail, admire what you have without believing I am entitled to it, compete with you without hating you, and want recognition without demanding attention. Perhaps most importantly, I can believe in myself without requiring everyone else to believe in me.
That may be particularly difficult today. Humans have always made noise, but we now possess extraordinary tools for amplifying it. Recognition can be counted in followers, likes, views, rankings, wealth, titles, awards, sales, comments, and attention. A person can receive immediate numerical evidence that someone noticed them, making it increasingly easy to confuse being noticed with mattering.
They are not necessarily the same thing. The loudest person in the room may be important, but they may also simply be loud.
That brings us back to the crickets and frogs. Perhaps the interesting part of their competition is not determining which creature can make the most noise. For human beings, the more interesting question is why winning that competition can become so important to us in the first place.
Maybe it begins with something primal. We survive, compete, belong, reproduce, protect, and acquire. Then awareness adds another dimension. We do not merely exist; we know we exist. We know others exist, and we know they are looking at us, evaluating us, competing with us, accepting us, rejecting us, or perhaps not noticing us at all.
Somewhere between instinct and awareness emerges a distinctly human question: Do I matter?
That question can drive us toward extraordinary achievement, self-confidence, discipline, contribution, and purpose. It can also drive us toward entitlement, envy, resentment, domination, and the willingness to climb over someone else simply to stand a little taller.
The crickets will chirp and the frogs will croak. Humans will make noise too. Perhaps the important Moral Science question is not who can make the most noise, but what our need to be heard causes us to become.
