sore winners revisited

let's do some stretching and thinking out loud

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Back in 2019, I wrote a piece about sore winners. The gist of it was that there a lot of people whose sense of themselves is so built around being the underdog that they can’t admit to being top dog. They need to figure out ways to keep being the underdog. I singled out Taylor Swift as an example of this behavior because (as you might have noticed) I like her, and when I write these meta-critical pieces my big theme tends to be “don’t identify yourself with your tastes” so I try to practice what I preach.¹

Lately, I see the “sore winners” framing popping up a lot. Like I’ll be watching a YouTube video and there it is, or reading a piece of writing and there it is. And as an early adopter of calling people out for being winners in denial, I feel like I should be enjoying all this. But I don’t—actually I’m finding it a bit annoying. Could this just be why didn’t you cite me vanity? Maybe.… But I didn’t invent the idea of the sore winner.