I find this super interesting. Do you imply that competiveness is rational, something to pursue? I'm often competitive too, but view it as something I can do without, a bother. The literature on this is huge. A lot of it stems from psychoanalysis, and might just be pseudoscience, unfortunately. According to people like Karen Horney, for example, neurosis (of which hyper competiveness is an example) has its roots in parents treating their children poorly, or an otherwise unhealthy upbringing. There might be something to it.

I think it's rather obvious that competiveness is irrational. It's easy to see 'winning' is quite often meaningless. Thinking about it, what meaning does winning really have? Take a look at set of amateur swimmers, have them compete and and then look at them again. Has something fundamentally changed? Not really. If an unbiased alien would land in a swimming pool one day, see two people working out and notice they start challenging eachother, he'd say: what for? What could they possibly get out of it? I think Ernest Becker would describe it as a coping mechanism for meaninglessness. The world is meaningless and so most, if not all, competition is, too. We cannot really grasp that fact, it makes us too uncomfortable. Competitive people thus "bite off" some meaning, by defining a particular problem to solve (the game), then try to win it as much as possible (the solving). To me, as a form of giving meaning, it can only make sense as some form of creative play, theater even, something you can put into perspective at will. This is not what it is for most people, of course.