Messi Jersey Guy

Today I saw a man wearing a Lionel Messi jersey. It was weird. It was not the ubiquitous blaugrana jersey that you see everywhere. No. It was the new Paris St. Germain one. It felt foreign. It got me thinking. How dares the emblem of Culés betray his tribe? And how cheap of that guy to jump ship from Barça to PSG just because of a player? The strangeness of seeing the PSG emblem in the same piece of clothing with the letters Messi in the back hit me. We are nothing but pawns. Cheap imitators who crave for models to follow. Without them, we are lost. This whole post-modernist idea that says "you're unique", "you're an individual", "you're cool in your own way" is complete bullsh*t. 

The man wearing that jersey wants to be like Messi. Why else would he be willing to shell out $200 to signal to the world that he's committed to emulate him? What part of Messi he wants to be, I don't know. The fame? The money? The ability to dribble past 8 opponents? The tax cheat? That fact is somebody told him when he was a young boy that to be like him was a worthy goal. And now he wears the jersey of the team he plays at (whatever it is). 

The sad part is, we are all the Messi Jersey Guy. Every decision we make is based one way or another --consciously or not-- on an external model we want to emulate. It might be Daniel Craig's Bond showing us how cool it would be to wear an Omega...

...or the colleague who showed up to work today on a new car and made you now want that very car. Or quite simply, your college classmates who wanted to go into investment banking or consulting because... well, that was the sexy thing to do, and now you want to book job interviews in the industry... because, if they want it, it must be because it's good (I suppose). 

Hence, individuality does not exist. At least not in the sense peddled in western liberal democracies. Our psychological self-determination is a mirage that allows us to navigate in blissful ignorance the consumer economy. 

By the time you chose that very unique name for your new baby (which you thought no one else would pick) a cascade of babies had already been named "Isabella", (sorry). Like you, every woman wanted to be the Twilight girl. You want what you want because somebody else wanted it first, or else you would not know about it. This is independent from whether you know it or not. And that is totally fine, as long as you don't tramp on other people to achieve it. It is perfectly healthy to want to better yourself because you caught yourself in a competitive race with someone in your social circle who also wants to better him/herself. Constructive competitiveness is actually what placed a man on the moon after all. Kennedy competed with the Russians on the space race by unleashing the better angels of human ingenuity, and devoted the resources needed to spark the Apollo program. No zero-sum-game mentality. Trump competed with the Chinese on the AI race by blacklisting Huawei and choking the Asia giant with tariffs, hurting the US in the process. There's constructive competitiveness, and then there's destructive competitiveness. Pick Kennedy, please.  

Being aware of the imitation you're performing helps you legitimate the act of bettering yourself in your own mind. It gives you agency. It allows you to own up to it, and hone in on your skills. Heck, it allows you to switch models if needed. That awareness also helps you to be more discerning about where to pick those external models from. I'd venture to say that going fishing for them on social media is not good. 

To know that you want to be like Messi because he's the f*cking greatest helps. To know that you know  that you are imitating the greatest is even better. But to actually embrace the zeal Messi trains with and embody his craft is what will truly deliver you what you are after. 

And for that, you don't need to parade with a PSG Messi jersey telling the world you paid $200 for a t-shirt.