We live in an age where indomitable, driven people who can never be wrong – and who accumulate vast amounts of wealth and power – are widely admired as winners. You see these venerated winners everywhere, often sour-faced, whining loudly about how everyone persecutes them and is trying to steal what is rightfully theirs. What is rightfully theirs is everything in the world, because they are winners. Only losers don’t understand this.

Winning and losing, of course, are the outcomes of games, sporting events, individual transactions, negotiations, fights. Winning and losing are transient states, not a final end judgment on a person’s entire being or what they deserve. An insatiable desire to win the game of life is the hallmark of a gigantic, deluded asshole who needs to feel better than others. It’s nice to win a fair contest of skill, it feels great. That it’s possible to win life itself is a ridiculously childish idea.

People do not win or lose in life, as a look in any direction can confirm. Life is change, chance, desire, work, learning, happy accident, or sad one. The idea of dividing the world into winners and losers (more accurately entitled exploiters and the rightfully exploited) was created and popularized by people who can never be wrong, and it appeals to some primitive, wishful part of the human psyche. In their stilted, black and white, zero sum, win-lose worldview people who win are superior to losers and therefore entitled to whatever they can wrest from others. That’s why CEO pay in Fortune 500 companies went from 30 times the median worker pay in the 1970s to 350 times that today. CEOs are winners, clearly, and average workers are fucking losers, and parasites, and jealous losers and parasites at that.

The story of my permanent banishment from a group of old friends, all very accomplished, hard working pillars of their communities, all full of love and loyalty and unappealably harsh, to-the-death judgment toward certain “losers,” shines a light on how foolish the notion of winners and losers is to describe human life, and how destructive it is to us all.