Healthy or not, I spend a great deal of my cognitive load during my off-hours mulling over the archetypes of people I have encountered throughout my life.

I acknowledge that people do not fit cleanly into molds, and also that it is impossible to completely understand or predict a person's thoughts, feelings, words, or actions (well, for now, at least. I secretly hypothesize that we would find human responses to stimuli to be completely deterministic if we just had enough compute…). But I try my best to create mental models of the people I know well despite this.

I've been doing this for as long as I can remember and thought it to be a very ordinary habit. It was only very recently, while opening up about how I've been coping with the push-and-pull dynamic of a very tragic romantic situation I have stubbornly thrown myself into repeatedly over the past two years, that I realized it may not be so. And while putting words to this thing, I found myself admitting that it is likely a coping mechanism I have developed to grapple with the partial loss of control we must submit to, as just one member of a party of two, in interpersonal relationships.

This model-making is, at its core, a form of pattern-matching. It has helped me to reliably predict love interests' intentions and developments in many of my close friend's characters over the years. And in many situations, I've been leaning on these models to anticipate how people will respond to me and then protect myself from being blindsided or hurt by them.

Some might call this overthinking. I prefer to call it analysis.

I'd like to turn your attention, now, to a very specific archetype I've observed and am growing weary of: the perpetual adversary.

You likely know a few of these. You may even be one yourself.

I was surrounded by perpetual adversaries during my adolescence—the environment we were raised in encouraged the proliferation of this personality type, and I had no choice but to entertain them. I even adopted some of their characteristics over time. But I feel that I have outgrown this type of person in recent years.

The perpetual adversary is someone who insists on turning absolutely everything into a competition. He must have the highest income, the biggest apartment, and the shortest mile time. He also needs to have the finest book collection, the best sleep, and even the greatest spice tolerance.

I scorn the people who default to thinking this way. My face often contorts when a friend reveals this hypercompetitive thinking pattern, and I ask, "Why do you think like that? What is wrong with you?"

Sometimes I respond with this as a joke. Sometimes it's not a joke at all.

I hypothesize that Adam, our perpetual adversary, is deeply insecure. He lacks the confidence or the sense of self necessary to feel comfortable in his own skin. He feels inadequate. And he hides his worries of incompetence behind an overinflated ego, a thin veneer of confidence.

Confidence owned can hold its own—it does not require much upkeep. But confidence borrowed is a very needy little sham indeed. So Adam finds himself forced to scrape together pointless metrics and build leaderboards for every sphere of his life, regardless of its futility. He needs to stack-rank himself against whoever is nearest constantly. And personal growth, on its own terms, is never quite enough for him—he cannot register it as progress unless there is someone positioned beneath it.

This response to insecurity, I have found, makes Adam a poor friend. He mismanages his insecurities and allows them to sour his relationships. He views everything as zero-sum and therefore cannot find joy in your happiness—each of your successes is a threat to him.

He is almost narcissistic in that regard—not because he thinks constantly of his own greatness, but because he cannot process anything that happens to you without first considering what it means for him.

And because he views the people around him as competitors rather than as people, he is stingy with the things that may benefit them: opportunities, introductions, good news passed along in time to matter. He would rather sit on a lead than hand you one.

He also, I am fairly certain, relishes your failures. Though I doubt he would say this plainly.

I feel that a person who needs you to lose in order to feel self-confidence cannot be trusted to be in your corner. He can want you—your company, your approval, your presence at dinner—while still needing you to live in his shadow.

As I grow more mature and more confident, my patience for this type of person wanes. I'm finding that the world is too vast to limit ourselves to petty and competitive interactions—to be consumed by endless comparison.

And my community and inner circles ought to be built on foundations of mutual respect and admiration, not competition. I recognize that a win for any one of my people is a win for me as well. Every time I take a step forward, I will reach a hand out to my loved ones and pull them forward with me. And I can trust that they will do the same for me.

Adam, still at war with himself, doesn't have the capacity to do this. At least not yet.

And that is why I no longer make room for Adam-shaped personalities in my life.