Greasy pole or Cockayne pole is a children's game, a competition that waves prizes to whoever can reach them; it has European origins and is also very common in the interior of Brazil. The first records of this game are in medieval texts, and it probably derives from a game created in Italy, the Neapolitan game of the Cockaigne pole. The competition consists of a stake, a pole stuck in the ground that holds at its end money or baskets with prizes to be reached by the competitors, who one by one try to climb the pole greased with tallow or other lubricants to make it slippery, causing falls and making it difficult to access the prizes.

This game, which is no longer restricted to European cultures but is widespread in countless countries from the Americas to Asia, can be taken as a metaphor to understand a central aspect of human formation in recent centuries, its educational systems, and underlying or even explicit messages, whether in social institutions or families.

Many people believe and are brought up to think that obstacles will be overcome and that everything depends on individual effort to be rewarded, to emerge victorious. Goals, dreams, ambitions, and greed are structured in this way, and it is in this process that we are torn away from the present experience. We stop living in the present in order to focus on the future, on the objectives that we have established as our purpose and meaning in life, as what will make us feel successful and fulfilled in the future.

Living for the sake of achieving goals and dreams, believing in one's own efforts and personal qualities creates addicts who are obsessed with the results that justify their existence. This process is psychologically characterised by attitudes that destroy tranquillity and well-being. Anxiety, fear, envy, and unstoppable desires to get what they want generate people who act like foremen and executioners, or act like beggars who submit, steal, and even kill to achieve their goals. Actions range from seemingly inconsequential everyday attitudes to widespread nefarious behaviour. In this context, when victories, dreams, and desires are not realised, frustration and depression arise.

The 20th century was characterised by an increase in cases of depression, as well as technological excellence and socio-economic disparities. These inequalities are like chasms and have functioned exactly like the greasy pole game. Excessive competition and insatiable greed are the waterproofing agents that cause people to slip when they focus their entire lives on results. The motto of competitors is to destroy anything that stands in the way of achievement. Little or nothing is spared when we focus our attitude on competing and staying at the top of our careers, at the top of society in short.

The idea that everything can be achieved as long as you fight for it, as long as you make an effort, has turned professionals into machines for carrying out functions, exiled merciful and compassionate eyes from relational processes, and created fortresses to hide fears and incapacities. The victors, who reduce everything to effort and competition, manage to amass incapacities, to survive by turning other beings into a mass of manoeuvre, a ladder on which to climb towards their goals.

To live well is to experience what is happening, to live in the present. Denying it, putting it off for later, for the future, is a harmful postponement that empties and mechanizes, leaving the being without flexibility. In this sense, returning to our metaphor, every greasy pole should motivate you to knock it down, since it's an unreasonable obstacle. It turns out that this attitude runs counter to the way we are brought up to look at life, because knocking down and disregarding everything that requires effort to realize future goals, everything that is based on victories and failures, is only possible when you accept the continuity of being-there-and-now-in-the-world-with-the-other.

We need to question the foundations of this educational process that takes us out of the present and throws us into competition and rivalry, which directs us toward goals. Education transformed into an instrument for realizing goals and dreams is an objectification that denies the present. It loses its defining purpose as a process for acquiring skills and broadening cognitive references.

Relational processes are not just about competition, they are not just about the abyss, nor are they about a ‘bed of roses’ or chimeras and dreams of happiness. Relationships are about participation, involvement, equalisation, contradiction, destruction, despair, goodness, and evil, but all of this while experiencing what is happening, and not as a lever for what you need or want to happen.