Invisible Duels
You didn’t agree to this duel, but it’s happening.
This is an essay about a deeply human tendency and unpleasant truth that exists in every competitive, ambitious community (and in all communities to a degree). It’s the struggle behind the pure “positive-sum” aspiration. This essay is an attempt at “saying the quiet part out loud” to ideally contribute to greater self-understanding and the greater good.
No one announces an invisible duel. No handshake. No starting pistol. No finish line. Yet here you are—caught in one. One moment, you’re focused on yourself. The next, you’re acutely aware of someone in your orbit, running right alongside you in the vast digital expanse. You didn’t agree to this duel, but it’s happening.
This isn’t a classic rivalry. No terms, no prize, no formal competition, no acknowledgements. Instead, it’s subtler, more personal—and more insidious. These duels are everywhere, in personal and professional worlds, even if tacit.
Invisible duels are both classic and modern—increasingly the toxic spawn of hyper-visible timelines with hyper-curated identities. Social media doesn’t just force us to measure ourselves against the amorphous presence of billions; it gives us an endless stream of individuals to fixate on, sentencing us to siloed soft competition—unspoken, intimate, impossible to ignore.
The invisible duel is a battle within yourself, masked as a silent battle with someone else, where their progress becomes a quiet threat to your own.
Sometimes it’s hard to tell who even initiated the duel—who’s fixated on whom? Sometimes you’re the one watching, other times you’re the one being watched. You notice every move they make—and they seem to notice your every move too. Or maybe it’s both. (It’s the rare case when it only takes one to start.)
How does the object of the duel usually emerge?
Proximity without friendship. They’re in your orbit: a coworker, an industry friendly, an acquaintance from Instagram or Twitter or LinkedIn. You don’t know them well, yet their wins feel personal—like messages just for you.
Parallel progress. They’re not far enough ‘ahead’ to feel untouchable, nor far enough ‘behind’ to dismiss. Their milestones mirror yours but distort them, like a funhouse mirror warping your self-image.
Signals of success. It’s not just big wins. It’s subtle clues too: invitations to admired rooms, praise from respected voices, buzz around their latest project—all visible, amplified, inescapable.1
And yet, we pretend these duels don’t exist.
At times, these duels even offer some temporary good—pushing you to react, to dream bigger and aim higher while shaking off complacency. Feedback from the universe is not without use. (Not surprisingly then, some people use these duels as motivational fuel—what you could call dirty fuel—but fuel nonetheless.)2
Some people succumb to invisible duels constantly, hopping from one duel to the next, no matter the context or person; others sidestep them with great effort. The intensity of duels varies too—from a momentary gust of wind to a debilitating flu.
Every adult has to have been in one, if not many.
Half of you are probably wrapped up in one right now—Who is it?
Still, it’s fashionable to deny competition as instinct. We hide behind the polite fiction that it’s just our companies, products, or ideas that are competing—not us. Not us. But behind every subtle flex and celebratory post lies an unspoken truth:
Competition is deeply personal. We’re not just competing for things—we’re competing for our own self-worth and unique narrative identity.
All the famed philosophers have warned us that our greatest battles are internal ones. The invisible duel is no different—it’s less about the other person and more about what they trigger in us.
Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment captures the silent festering of duels: envy transmuted into self-loathing, making us reactive to others’ values instead of our own. Girard’s mimetic desire explains how these duels can start: we want what others chase because their pursuit makes it seem valuable. Sartre’s le regard shows how being seen by others shapes our actions, reducing us to objects in their gaze.
The problem, Nietzsche might argue, is that ressentiment makes us forget to ask, “What do I want?” Instead, we obsess over, “Why don’t I have what they do?” We’re pulled away from authentic self-determination and into a cycle of reactive sprints—breeding resentment for our own path and obscuring the clarity that we need.
Fixating on someone’s progress—or validating their fixation on yours—nudges you toward paths you wouldn’t have chosen. It’s not the worst thing to pay attention to the world around you, but to single out the sources and people you do to very few—just one—will steer you in the wrong direction.
Comparison isn’t just the thief of joy, it’s the thief of direction. And as I’ve often said, ambition without direction just leaves you with anxiety.
The paradox is this: invisible duels don’t just distract you; they diagnose you. The emotions they provoke—envy, fear, restlessness—are signals, revealing something unspoken about what we truly want but haven’t pursued with clarity or confidence. You’re bothered and battling because you’re not truly grounded in your own values and goals, and you’re not happy with your speed of progress.
So how do you escape? Start by releasing the object of your duel:
Make the world small. Shrink the universe you pay attention to.
Make them insignificant. Zoom out. Of all people, why this person?
Make them distant. Achieve escape velocity—leave their orbit entirely! (This works in concept but is emotionally dangerous to bet on.)
Make them neutral. The healthiest and arguably hardest—be unshakable.3
The best way to stop thinking about someone else— to render these invisible duels too insignificant to even want to pay attention to— is get so positively absorbed in something that’s in your own private sphere, in your own control. I don’t like to prescribe obsession, but it’s truly great at blocking out everything else. Healthy obsession is a state of focused joy. Of course, it’s easier said than done.
Ultimately, getting caught in any invisible duel, or visible one for that matter, is a trap. Someone else’s success can neither be your blueprint nor benchmark. Again, easier said than done, but clarity, focus, and an authentic sense of direction are the rare things that give you peace and conviction to go your own way.
The truth? The duel was never theirs—it was always yours. It was never about who was on the other end. It was never about who was ahead or behind. It was about why you ever cared.
The duel doesn’t end because you’ve won or they’ve lost. It ends because you’ve stopped letting the terms be dictated—by the algorithms, the audience, the invisible adversaries—by anyone but yourself. It ends because you’ve stopped playing—and that was the only way it ever could.
Let me know your experiences and observations about this—I’d love to discuss in the comments. And if this essay resonates, please like it and share with a friend or community that might like it too.
P.S. Thanks to Stefan and Bharat for feedback on drafts of this, via Writers Block.
Invisible duels really seem to thrive where ambition meets scarcity—in communities and industries where attention, opportunity, funding, recognition feel limited—this makes sense. (They’re rampant in the whole Silicon Valley / tech / startup / venture capital and media & entertainment spheres, but also in niche places like academics.) They also feed off of visibility. Often one person in the duel will have some public presence, whether for themselves or their work, making it easier for people to tether themselves to their progress.
Some people are really good at leveraging these duels—fueling themselves by imagining (or outright declaring) the rivalry. The launch point for these rivalries is often a perceived injustice or insult which then turns into a vendetta—the invisible duel that in this case is very conscious. I’m a big tennis fan, and no one seems to do this more than Novak Djokovic. It works for him, and some who can compartmentalize emotion and motivation, but for most of us, it’d be destructive.
The easiest way to quit a duel? Enter a new one. Not good! Like jumping from one toxic relationship to another: false closure and a new trap.
So good. This resonated. I have a journal entry i make titled "The Ego vs the Soul" and it's filled with entries i make anytime i do something that doesn't feel aligned to values i care about or is externally driven. This encapsulated those feelings clearer than i could put it.
Great piece. Strangely this reminded me of Ted Giaoa's essay on the importance of having a nemesis: https://www.honest-broker.com/p/you-dont-need-a-mentorfind-a-nemesis.