Positional Goods Make Life Hard | Generated by AI
Question: Is life hard because good things (like iPhones or good jobs) are scarce and everyone competes for them?
Answer:
Yes, and this is a real structural phenomenon, not just a feeling. A few lenses that sharpen it:
Positional goods vs. absolute goods
Economist Fred Hirsch called these “positional goods” — things whose value depends on your rank relative to others, not on the absolute quantity available. A good job at Google isn’t just “good” — it’s good because not everyone has it. Even if everyone got smarter, the top 1% of jobs stays 1%. More competition, same number of slots. This is fundamentally different from, say, bread — if we produce more bread, everyone benefits.
The iPhone example is actually the weaker case
iPhones are mass-produced. The competition isn’t really for the phone — it’s for the money to buy it. The real scarcity is income and status. The phone is just a proxy signal.
Mimetic desire amplifies it
René Girard’s insight: we don’t desire things independently — we desire what others desire. Social media turned this dial to 11. You didn’t want that specific job or neighborhood until you saw someone else have it. The desires themselves are contagious, which means we collectively create more competition than the underlying scarcity requires.
But the frame is incomplete
Not everything good is positional:
- Deep skills compound privately — being a better engineer doesn’t require someone else to be worse
- Knowledge, curiosity, craftsmanship, relationships — these aren’t zero-sum
- Building things that didn’t exist before creates value outside the competition loop
Your trajectory specifically (training models, building agents, deep technical competency) is mostly non-positional. The understanding you get from reading a transformer paper doesn’t come at someone else’s expense.
The honest answer
Life is hard for the positional things. But the people who escape the hamster wheel usually do it by competing in non-positional games — building skills, creating things, solving problems nobody’s solving yet. That’s closer to what Karpathy or Yin Wang actually did.
The trap is optimizing for the signal (job title, salary band, brand) instead of the underlying capability. The signal is positional. The capability is not.