Imagine you have this friend who keeps dropping names about this new job that he got. You don't remember him doing this in the past, but now he can't seem to talk about anything else. You aren't clear whether he is trying to brag, impress, or if he is just excited about his new job. All that you are sure of is that he is annoying the living piss out of you. Call him out, right? But this friend doesn't take criticism well. It's not that he'll throw out his chair and walk away. Rather, he'll get real quiet there and kind of sulk. Plus you haven't seen him in a while so it is exactly this kind of catching up that you're supposed to be engaged in. Making him a silent "not offended" friend would be counter productive. And while you're sitting there weighing this out in your head, on he goes making more irritating references to famous people you've never heard of and don't care about. You're distracted now so it takes more concentration to follow the course of a conversation that you find annoying in the first place, which makes you even more irritated. Eventually you decide that it is madness--trying to figure out how to nicely criticize that friend, which the combination of trying and caring are making you more infuriated than the original annoyance in the first place. So you decide to drop it. It doesn't matter much anyways. People get excited about new jobs.

Does this constitute defeat? When you make this decision, is there some kind of universal tally that marks a point in your friend's favor, that takes a point away from you. Are you at a loss of some limited quantity of victory in the universe because of this decision that you made in your head?