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“Second place is just the first loser” is an aphorism widely attributed to the legendary NASCAR champion Dale Earnhardt. Or as my late father put it, (mostly) jokingly, “It’s not enough to win. Your friends have to lose too.”

We may not want others to know we think this way. But think this way we do, because humans are born and wired to compete with one another. What was probably an evolutionary trait derived from a chronic scarcity of resources in our premodern past, the need to win still manifests in many areas of life, sometimes in absurd ways. People jockey for position in line to get on an airplane. They compare how many “likes” they have on social media. We see billionaires envy multibillionaires, and famous actors complaining about the Oscar or Emmy that should have been theirs. In my own world of academia, I have witnessed bitter disputes over a few square feet of office space.

[Read: The real hero of Ted Lasso]

Although the competitive spirit may be as natural as breathing air, it does not always lead to human flourishing. On the contrary, left unmanaged, it can create misery for ourselves and others. Fortunately, there is a formula to solve this problem without unrealistically suggesting that we dispense entirely with our competitive urge: Instead of always going for gold, shoot for the bronze.

To expand on the wisdom of Earnhardt, although second place may be the first loser, third place can be the real winner—at least when it comes to happiness and longevity. This conclusion comes from research conducted on Olympic athletes. In a 1995 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, scholars studied the emotional reactions of silver and bronze medalists in the 1992 Summer Olympic Games both immediately after their events and later on the awards podium. They discovered that the bronze winners appeared consistently happier on average than the silver medalists. (The study did not consider the gold-winning athletes.)

More recent research has looked at the life span of all three medalist categories. A 2018 study in the journal Economics & Human Biology tracked the average longevity of those representing the U.S. in the Olympic Games from 1904 to 1936 and found that the athlete whose best performance was silver lived to 72. Gold medalists beat this by a solid four years, living to 76. But first prize in longevity went to the bronze medalists, who lived to 78.

[Gene B. Sperling: Punching Steph Curry]

The study had a handy explanation for this discrepancy: “Dissatisfactory competition outcomes may adversely affect health.” In other words, silver medalists see themselves as the first loser because they look up to the top step and compare themselves only with the gold medalists, whereas the bronze winners compare themselves favorably with all the others who never made it onto the podium at all. (It would be interesting to know how long the poor souls who came in fourth lived.)

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This hypothesis is based on a considerable body of literature showing the difference between upward and downward social comparison. When we compare ourselves with those who have more money, power, or achievements, we often feel like, well, losers. What exactly does famous or rich or fast mean, besides having more celebrity, money, or athletic ability than someone else (that is, you)?

That is why people so commonly feel bad about themselves after checking out the lives of others on social media who post only about their victories and celebrations. In contrast, downward comparison makes people feel better about themselves and, thus, happier. In fact, researchers have found that comparing our own circumstances with the unfortunate lot of others is a reliable technique for reducing a negative mood—and not out of schadenfreude or malice but because rewards in life are relative. So, as for the medal-winning athletes, the perception of other people’s position helps you establish your own sense of good fortune.

The worldly happiness strategy of striving for gold every day is foolish. Fixing your hopes for contentment on being No. 1 is about the most precarious approach you can adopt. More likely, you will spend most of your time feeling like a silver medalist: always aspiring, pinning your bliss on a single outcome, but succumbing again and again to the tyranny of probability—and disappointment. Much better, then, to aim for healthy competition in which you do your best without expectation of being the absolute winner. Here are three things to keep in mind as you pursue a happy, bronze-medalist lifestyle.

1. Think Local, Not Global
One of the biggest problems in modern social comparison is the expanding pool of people with whom, in nearly every area of life, you can compare yourself. We are confronted daily with details about the most wealthy, powerful, glamorous, and admired people on the planet. Modern technology offers competing standards that are impossible to meet.

Realizing this and adjusting the comparison pool can help fight the resulting modern angst. Rather than looking at the lives of the rich and famous on Instagram or Hulu, get involved in the lives of people in your local community. Rather than dreaming about giving a concert at Carnegie Hall, go play at your neighborhood community center. Living locally gives us a proper frame of reference for our own accomplishments—one that some scholars contend better matches our ancestral environment and therefore gives us the contentment we need.

2. Don’t Make Your Competition “One and Done”
Competition is especially problematic for happiness when it involves a one-off event, such as the Olympics. We need lots of opportunities to excel, and staking our whole sense of self on one event is likely to result in disappointment. Even if you win, a singular victory means that your greatest moment is immediately in the past. A former star athlete once told me that his biggest trophy was now a source of bitterness. “It sits there on my shelf mocking me,” he said, “because I can no longer live up to it.” Much better, if possible, to subject yourself to contests in a sustained pattern over time. In business, for example, make friendly competition a routine event where sometimes you win and sometimes you don’t.

[Arthur C. Brooks: America is pursuing happiness in all the wrong places]

Perhaps this sounds a little unambitious or unnatural to you, but what I am describing is an actual adaptive strategy in nature. Researchers report this fascinating finding about how young rats play-fight as part of their development. Invariably, one rat attacks first, gains advantage—and could “win” most of the time. But to keep the bouts going, the opponent lets the defending rat prevail about 30 percent of the time. Compete like a happy rat.

3. Contend Against Yourself Instead of Others
One of the problems with most competition against others is that it tends to lower the intrinsic motivation, and thus enjoyment, that people derive from their activities. Decades ago, researchers showed this in such enduring experiments as asking people to solve puzzles and then measuring the interest they reported: They found the puzzles less rewarding when competing against others rather than against the clock. Simply having a time limit means competing against themselves—which is often more fun. The principle at work here is that trying to improve your own past performance provides a sense not of “winning” but of progress.

In case all else fails, I should mention one last way to go for the bronze that comes from the ancient Greeks. The late archaeologist Stephen Gaylord Miller described the funeral games of Patroklos, in which athletes exerted themselves physically and mentally as if to state triumphantly, “I am alive!” If you adopt this approach in your own daily life contests, you will rightfully claim the sweetest prize: life itself. And the only person to whom you will have to compare yourself is you.

Local hero Yondonperenlei Baskhuu gives the hosts their first gold at the Ulaanbaatar Grand Slam

The vape shops seem to be multiplying. You’ve almost certainly noticed them, if only because most are difficult to miss, decked as they tend to be in rainbow colors and neon signs. You might have emerged from pandemic isolation to find a new one next to your local smoothie shop, or maybe one has sprouted in a long-vacant storefront you always wished would turn into something you actually need.

The national trend line is strong: Since 2018, the number of vape shops in the country has increased by an average of almost 20 percent annually, according to one estimate. The retail vape market isn’t growing by leaps and bounds everywhere, says Timothy Donahue, the managing editor of Vapor Voice, an industry trade and advocacy publication. In Alabama, for example, a law restricting where vape shops can be located has made it hard to open new ones. But such laws are the exception instead of the rule. For now, vape shops appear to be a winning business model in most places. Their neon signs glow across cities, suburbs, exurbs, and rural small towns alike, even when many other kinds of retail stores are struggling to stay afloat in the same places.

But what exactly is the business model? Colloquially, vape shop is a catchall term that can be applied to a cohort of similar retailers: those that sell only vaporizers and their related nicotine or cannabis products; those that lead with hemp-derived products like CBD in forms vapeable and non; and those that might have been called “smoke shops” a decade ago, which stock things such as loose-leaf tobacco and hookah supplies in addition to new lines of vapes, oils, and gummies. In places where recreational cannabis sales are legal, vape shop is a term that might be used to describe some actual licensed dispensaries, though mainly those are just called, well, dispensaries. Vape shops are, first and foremost, specialty stores, even though they all seem to specialize in something slightly different.

Some of the factors in these shops’ success are pretty clear. For those that do it, selling cannabis products, legally or illegally, is not an unremunerative pursuit. And vaping nicotine exploded in popularity at the end of the 2010s, especially among young people. Even so, the broad flourishing of these stores can nonetheless challenge credulity. Vape shops have spread across the American retail landscape with a bizarre swiftness, seemingly unbeholden to the same vagaries of inflation, customer demand, and local real estate that bind every other kind of storefront small business in the country. How do they stay in business if they generally don’t seem swamped with customers? Why can so many of them make the numbers work when so many other kinds of small retailers struggled during the pandemic? What are they up to?

I have spent much of the past few years pondering those exact questions as vape shops grew seemingly unbidden in the expensive Brooklyn retail real estate around me. I asked neighbors, friends, and people who owned other local businesses for their theories, and nobody had any compelling ideas, except that the shops were all selling weed. (More on that in a second.) For the past few months, I’ve been trying to figure out the answer myself and have encountered mostly dead ends: Not many academics study the phenomenon, and those I contacted declined to speak with me. One cited a wariness about alienating the subjects of his research. Local vape-shop owners clammed up as scrutiny over their sales practices increased. People who manage retail rentals, broker commercial leases, or analyze commercial-real-estate data declined to speculate on the phenomenon or didn’t acknowledge my inquiries at all.

I think I’ve figured it out anyway.

First, the elephant in the room: Yes, some of these shops are doing a fantastic business in under-the-table or dubiously legal cannabis, especially in places where new laws have reduced penalties for unlicensed sales or created some legal confusion over exactly what merchants are allowed to carry. New York City is a prime example of this phenomenon. Vape shops have become common even in luxury shopping districts with sky-high rents. Mitchell Moss, an urban-planning professor at NYU, credits the shops’ quick proliferation in large part to what he described to me as the state’s “unmitigated disaster” of a legalization process. Recreational cannabis use has been legal in New York for more than two years, and penalties for its illegal sale (which is now more of a regulatory issue than a drug-trafficking one) have been drastically reduced, but the state did not get around to licensing a single recreational dispensary until late last year. In the interim, demand for cannabis pushed its sale to an expanding gray market that operates largely through the city’s now-expansive constellation of vape shops, some of which have the stuff clearly visible behind the counter.

It’s impossible to say what proportion of America’s vape shops fund their business through revenue from contraband product, but I couldn’t find anyone who thought it was all or almost all of them, even in places where illegal retail sales now commonly result in a fine instead of a criminal charge. Instead, the easiest thing to explain about the proliferation of vape shops is the ready availability of the storefronts themselves. Landlords who lease to vape shops have long run some risk of provoking ire in the surrounding community or spooking prospective tenants for adjacent spaces, but the pandemic forced some of the country’s commercial landlords to get less picky. During 2020 and 2021, retail vacancies rose significantly. According to Andrew Csicsila, who leads the North American consumer-products practice at the consulting firm AlixPartners, this effect was especially pronounced in storefronts with a very small footprint, the kind that might have previously housed a cellphone dealer. These spaces tend to turn over quickly because of their size, Csicsila told me, and suddenly the new prospective tenants who would have usually cycled into the vacancies all but disappeared.

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This was vape shops’ golden opportunity. Not only had vaping surged in popularity in the years leading up to the pandemic, but vape shops themselves have turned out to be wonderfully suited to the limitations of small storefronts. Shops can fail in small spaces because there’s just not enough room for products and services that bring in enough customers, generate enough revenue, and provide enough gross margin to, at the very least, cover expenses. One reason that supermarkets, for example, are so big is that they make up for the food business’s notoriously thin margins by dealing in very high volumes, with huge corporate-wholesale purchases and tens of thousands of sometimes-bulky products in every store.

Vape shops solve the problem in the opposite way. Their start-up costs are low; their margins are high. All they need to get up and running is their inventory, some shelving units and display cases, and a guy or two behind the counter. (Whether they also need a big neon sign outside making some kind of stoner pun is up to the individual business owner, but it does seem to get factored into quite a few vape-shop budgets.) They deal in tiny, expensive objects, many of which need to be repurchased regularly: vials or cartridges of vape liquid, disposable e-cigarettes, rolling papers, tubs of CBD gummies, pouches of shisha. According to both Csicsila and Donahue, a retailer might buy a vial of e-liquid for as little as a couple of dollars from a wholesaler, and, depending on their market, that same vial could be priced anywhere from $10 to $30 in a vape shop. Wholesale prices for vapes and other equipment, they said, allow for similarly generous premiums.

Vape shops have one other advantage: Many of the high-margin products you’ll now find in a typical vape shop didn’t even exist five years ago, when a change in federal law threw open the floodgates for legal commercialization of many of the chemical compounds found in hemp. The constantly expanding menagerie of vape-shop products—CBD! Delta-8 THC!—can be pretty confusing for new or casual users. Some convenience stores and corner shops now carry a handful of the most basic vape and cannabinoid products, but Donahue said that their selections are limited. By contrast, Moss, the urban-planning professor, likened vape shops to old-school pharmacies: You come in, you tell the proprietor what your problem is or what effect you’re trying to create, and they talk you through your options and how to use your new purchases. When so much of a consumer-product market is largely inscrutable to its potential customer base, specialty shops with knowledgeable staff are how new products catch on.

Fahd Shoaib, the manager at Aurora Smoke Shop in Lovejoy, Georgia, south of Atlanta, told me that he and his cousin, who owns the store, spend a lot of their time at work answering questions. They are the business’s only two employees, and when they opened Aurora in March 2022, he said, they quickly found customers, even though they don’t advertise and don’t even have their name listed on the shopping-center marquee that’s visible to passing drivers on busy Tara Boulevard. The storefront is tucked between a Subway sandwich shop and a 24-hour laundromat, which provides plenty of foot traffic, Shoaib said, and his cousin picked their location because the surrounding area, way out in the suburbs, was not yet saturated with similar businesses.

The cousins sell both nicotine-vapor and legal cannabinoid-vapor products, as well as tobacco and supplies for hookah, which has experienced a less widely acknowledged burst of popularity in recent years, alongside vaping. They don’t stock cigarettes, except for Newports, which Shaoib said are the brand that customers ask for most frequently. Cigarettes are still the most popular nicotine products in the country among adults, but Shoaib told me he and his cousin consider the Newports more of a courtesy to their regulars than a real profit opportunity. The margins on cigarettes are far lower than they are on much of the rest of their inventory.

After Shoaib and I spoke, I noticed that relatively few vape shops in New York carry cigarettes. Their exclusion is telling, a clear hint at the grander context of how—and why—the vape market has spawned so many small businesses so quickly. The vapor industry is, in short, one of relatively few unconsolidated consumer-product markets in America. There is no Coca-Cola or ConAgra or Walmart of vapes. There is still Big Tobacco, yes, and there is still Juul, whose e-cigarettes the FDA is trying to banish from the country. But Juul’s once-dominant market share has declined sharply, thanks to the legal blowback and increased competition from the makers of disposable vapes, such as Elfbar. The nicotine-vape market is in the process of consolidating, Donahue told me, but compared with the market for combustible cigarettes, it’s still highly variable and competitive. He described the market for the other types of products that vape shops commonly carry as “fragmented.” Shoaib mentioned that one of the most important parts of his job is keeping up good relationships with the store’s distributors, precisely because so many small suppliers are bringing new products to market and the store benefits from guidance on what to stock.

Who’s not getting into the vapor business is arguably even more important to understanding the vape-shop phenomenon than who is. Many national big-box and grocery chains publicly disavowed the nicotine-vapor market before the pandemic, fearing association with a rise in vaping among teenagers and a rash of lung issues that later seemed to be connected to black-market THC vapes. Walmart, Target, Kroger, Walgreens, and CVS, for example, don’t carry any vapor products at all, and convenience stores that sell cigarettes are poorly equipped to compete with vape shops. Vapor products can also be difficult to sell online—some states forbid internet nicotine sales entirely, and in those that don’t, a combination of federal law and corporate policy means that USPS, UPS, and FedEx all refuse to ship parcels containing them. Some online sellers get around these restrictions by mislabeling shipments, but the rules generally discourage big, mainstream internet retailers from getting into the business. Cannabinoid products, because of their sometimes still-murky legality, among other reasons, have yet to really catch on among well-established corporate producers or retailers.

[Read: The death of the smart shopper]

For now, this squeamishness leaves the wholesale and retail markets feeding the vape-shop boom mostly to the little guys. In that way, it’s a reversal of the big trends in American retail dating back more than 40 years. When there’s no Walmart or Amazon around to pressure suppliers into sweetheart wholesale deals and undercut much smaller competitors on price, people buy things from local businesses. When a type of product has yet to be standardized through commoditization, lots of suppliers can make many different things and thrive simultaneously, and their variety spurs people to go to specialty shops, ask questions, and get recommendations. We are, of course, talking about vape shops here—these are not necessarily the most beneficial or widely needed types of local businesses that could be sprouting up in America’s unused retail space. But they provide something of an object lesson in the conditions under which a particular type of small, locally owned retailer can flourish, and, by extension, a lesson in why so many others have failed since the dawn of the big-box chain store.

The continued success of mom-and-pop vape shops is hardly guaranteed. Some of their products might be regulated out of existence at some point, and the market for whatever remains is likely to become more consolidated over time, just as we’re now seeing for nicotine. It’s not difficult to imagine the same thing happening with vape shops themselves, even if the traditional retail behemoths continue to abstain. Some operators will be more efficient than others, and they’ll expand and buy up competition; maybe, at some point, private equity or venture capital, which doesn’t have the responsibility to public perception that retail giants still do, will step in to speed that process and reap the financial rewards.

If vape shops as we know them do decline, in other words, it would likely mean not that we’ve won a public-health war against nicotine or cannabis but that the market for those products has simply become more efficient and more centralized, in the same way it has for virtually everything else Americans buy. In the meantime, small entrepreneurs are getting in where they can while the business is still good and the market’s math still lets people without enormous financial resources wring a good living out of some of America’s most inhospitable storefronts. Shoaib, when we talked, was considering expanding the family business and opening a vape shop of his own.

Local media say a teenaged member of Japan's Self Defence forces has been arrested in connection with the attack.

Local media reports suggest the British family had lived in the area for several years but had been in dispute with the neighbour over an area of land between their two properties.

Local official says unexploded mortar detonated near to where mostly children - aged between 10 and 15 - were playing.

The United States, you may have heard, is in a lifeguard shortage. The city of Houston is offering new lifeguards a $500 bonus. Jackson, Mississippi, is raising lifeguard pay by more than 40 percent. Colorado is “stepping up” with $250,000 for hiring lifeguard reinforcements; in the meantime, senior citizens are filling in. According to the American Lifeguard Association, about half of the nation’s public pools will have to close or reduce their hours this summer because of a lack of staff.

The current shortage can be largely blamed on pandemic-era closures and work restrictions, according to news reports. But if that accounts for this year’s shortage as well as those reported in 2020, 2021, and 2022, it cannot explain the national lifeguard shortages of 2018, 2016, or 2012. Or, for that matter, a reported lifeguard shortage in 1984. Or 1951. Or 1926.

These crises—and the newspaper stories that describe them—are as much a summer tradition as boardwalks and ice cream. Local or national news articles on the subject have appeared in May or June of every single year of the 21st century. Hundreds more specimens of this perennial have been published since the 1930s. Each lays out the same basic claims: The swimming season might be compromised; drownings could increase. But few acknowledge that such claims were also made the year before, and in all the years before that. Indeed, the specter of a long, unguarded summer has haunted us for five generations now, about as long as there have been formally trained lifeguards in America.

The reasons given for the shortages have varied with the times. Now, of course, we have COVID. In the 1980s, authorities blamed Gen X demographics: “It’s happening because there simply aren’t as many 16-year-olds,” one told The New York Times. In the 1950s, they blamed the IRS: “Many lifeguards quit before earning $600 so their fathers can claim them as income tax dependents,” explained the Minneapolis Star Tribune. In the 1940s, experts said that the draft had roped in so many of the nation’s young men that, per The Baltimore Sun, some beaches and pools were “seriously considering employing women.” And in the 1930s, the shortage was attributed to the absorption of potential lifeguards into the Works Progress Administration.

But overall, the purported causes of shortages are remarkably repetitive and, in many cases, remarkably ahistoric.

The stringent requirements of lifeguarding—taking and paying for a multiday course to pass a tough physical exam—are a recurring scapegoat. So is low pay. In 1941, pool managers complained that young men who hadn’t been drafted could make much more working in defense industries than as a lifeguard. In 2007, a New Jersey lifeguard captain lamented to the Times that “iPods and cellphones are expensive … If kids are looking for the highest-paying job, it isn’t likely to be lifeguarding.” In that same article, a Connecticut parks official blamed the growing emphasis on career-building (and the concurrent rise of internships). The YMCA’s water-safety specialist also cited internships, in 2021. Any time unemployment is low, someone accuses it of contributing to the lifeguard shortage.

By far the most consistent explanations over the years can best be described as “kids these days.” See 1987: “The kids around here have too much money.” And 2015: “There is another big turnoff: having a phone on the lifeguard stand is a firing offense.” And 2019: “Some [teens] are even frightened of the lifesaving responsibility the job carries.” And 2022: “People just don’t want to do this kind of job.” And 2023: “Since COVID, people don’t want to work.” Wyatt Werneth, the national spokesperson for the American Lifeguard Association, told me this week that, after the pandemic arrived, people who might otherwise be lifeguard candidates began opting for jobs that could be done at home, such as “the influencing and social media and stuff like that.”

And then, of course, there’s the biggest problem of all: No one looks up to lifeguards anymore. From The New York Times in 1984: “Lifeguards were once authority figures, just like teachers once were. But the glory of the authoritarian age is gone.” In 1985, the Times wistfully recalled the lifeguard-loving cinema of the ’50s and ’60s (Beach Blanket Bingo and its ilk) and the reverence it once inspired. Robert A. Kerwin, the water-safety coordinator of the New Jersey State Division of Parks and Forestry, told the paper, “The day of the macho lifeguard sitting in the chair flexing his muscles is finished. For one thing, 25 percent of our guards are girls.” (For what it’s worth, Newspapers.com lists plenty of articles about lifeguard shortages from the ’50s and the ’60s too.)

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The Times once declared, “The lifeguard is an endangered species.” But its population recovered briefly in the 1990s, thanks to David Hasselhoff. “When I became a lifeguard,” Werneth said, “we had Baywatch, and everybody wanted to be a lifeguard. They wanted that lifestyle where you had helicopters and you had fast boats and beautiful people, and you’re saving lives.” But Baywatch: Hawaii ceased production in 2001, and after that, Werneth told me, “things started declining.” Lifeguard employment took a dip and then a swan dive starting in 2020. “I can almost call it a ground zero,” Bernard Fisher, the director of the American Lifeguard Association, said of the shortage in a 2022 Fox News article.

Despite the tenor of that analogy (Fisher also compared the lack of lifeguards to the lack of baby formula), drowning rates haven’t really spiked. In fact, they’re now a third of what they were in 1970, and have been dropping steadily for a century or more. (There was a very slight uptick in 2020 and 2021, the most recent years for which data are available.) In other words, the many lifeguard crises of the past—or perhaps the single, never-ending one—have not correlated with any widespread drowning crises in America. That does not mean that lifeguard shortages are fake, but hard data on their scope remain obscure. Werneth told me that the American Lifeguard Association receives “very sporadic” reports from pools, parks, and beaches, and has just a rough sense of the level of need in different regions.

But if the lifeguard is once again an endangered species, it’s still beloved: more like a giant panda than a Gerlach’s cockroach. As a culture, we do still think of lifeguards as sexy, heroic, and essential (if not authoritarian). Baywatch may be off the air, but it’s always coming back.