Only rarely are rivalries as clean-cut as a competition, where one strives for goals that cannot be split, shared, or divided. Rivalries form clear points around which resentments, jealousies, envies, belonging, and feelings of superiority and inferiority, torturous in their formlessness, can safely coalesce and be discharged.
Where one does not compare, one cannot compete, yet placing oneself in rivalry with someone is a method of forcing comparison where one may not exist. By declaring oneself in competition one attempts to claim, to dispatch, and to vault above in a single motion.
There is another form of rivalry that, by commingling with pity, downgrades itself from envy into mere jealousy, the desired object being something like “belonging” or “favor.” It comes to land in insults thinly disguised as concern, subtle undermining, advice pitched to sabotage, gradual wearing down of another’s reality.
While striving for some form of psychological safety is helpful for group cohesion, trust is both impossible and absurd a notion. This leaves one feeling abruptly adrift, though this is the overall condition of life.