But I did it. I got everything I set out to get. I was the one delivering the offhanded refutation. It was me sipping water while I waited for the end of the applause. I still occasionally feel an impulse to attribute all my achievements that year to my perfect teammate, or worse, to good luck. But I’m not nineteen anymore; I don’t need to make... See more

After all, nothing in the outside world has changed as a result of my accumulation of debating accolades. I haven’t contributed to anyone’s understanding of anything, except maybe my own, and that only partially.

Success doesn’t come from within; it’s given to you by other people, and other people can take it away. In part, this is why I stopped competing. I didn’t want to give up the feeling of flow, that perfect, self-eliminating focus, but I didn’t want to perform it for points any more. Academic life had presented me with much the same problem: I... See more

Coming face to face with the irrelevance of your own strivings demands some kind of response. You can wallow in the pretend celebrity if you want, continue attending competitions every weekend and dutifully appearing in selfies with beaming novices, in the belief that you are actually important. Or you can self-justify in the guise of getting some... See more

‘Anything can be great,’ Fast Eddie says. ‘I don’t care, bricklaying can be great.’ But you don’t lay bricks with the intention of accumulating a record number of points, and you certainly don’t do it to attain some kind of phoney celebrity. For flow to be authentic, it has to be for its own sake. The ego has to fall away. This is not so difficult... See more

There was always a man, somewhere, who could be credited with my achievements: if not my teammate, then my coach, and if not my coach, then one of my previous teammates. So I learned how to thank them. And then smile.

The most ambitious debaters go out of their way to absorb information about sexual violence, racial profiling, police brutality: issues many of them will never experience firsthand. I did the same thing. Did it make me more empathetic and self-aware? Or did it just continue to affirm the idea that if I were smart and competitive enough, I could... See more

It’s also hard to stay impressed. By the time I was attending major championships, the speakers who had seemed so formidable when I first started out had graduated and left debating behind, or stayed around for long enough to become unremarkable. The machinery that drives effective speeches isn’t lastingly mysterious: observe it for long enough and... See more

Competitive debating takes argument’s essential features and reimagines them as a game. For the purposes of this game, the emotional or relational aspects of argument are superfluous, and at the end there are winners. Everyone tacitly understands that it’s not a real argument. Imagine if all conflict was like this: you don’t have to get upset or... See more