I was nineteen when I started debating competitively, and it’s probably fair to say that most things I did when I was nineteen were motivated by a desperation to be liked. I wasn’t only willing to lose debates: I was willing to tell all my secrets, to lend money when I couldn’t afford to, and to date anyone who showed an interest in me, no matter... See more

For me, the speaking part was easy, something like the experience of particularly quick and effortless typing: you think the words, and then the words appear on the screen, without any real awareness of the intermediary process. You think the concepts, and then the concepts express themselves. You hear yourself constructing syntactically elaborate... 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

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

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

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

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.

‘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

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