Anders Blume doesn't want to be the best CS:GO caster in the world. Not anymore.

On March 9, 2015, Anders' son Walter was born. Two days later, on March 11, he flew to the ESL One: Katowice Major. At the time, he felt like he had to go.

He was driven by this desire to be the best caster. To not be overlooked for future gigs because he missed an event. To stay among the most popular voices in CS:GO.

Now, he can't imagine doing anything so stupid.

"At the time it seemed like I sort of had to," Anders told theScore esports. "It was the Major tournament, there was all this hype, I think I felt like my mind was split between being in two different places. It is what it is, but I will definitely say I regret doing that now. I don't think that was necessarily a smart choice."

Anders said back then, even though it wasn't necessarily early in his casting career, he felt like he had to go to every event. He was competing there, almost like the players were, to be the best caster. These days, things are different. That drive to cast every single event isn't there anymore. It's not that he's phoning it in, he just doesn't think it's actually possible to be the best or the most popular caster in CS:GO. And that's helped him live a better life.

Anders started casting CS:GO in 2013, while he was a full-time student dissatisfied with school. He went from some guy with a microphone and OBS to one of the biggest names in Counter-Strike casting, providing commentary at 10 CS:GO Majors.

"I think most people who work at a high level in the industry feel that if you scale back by 20 percent, then you could risk that someone else is going to add another 30 percent. I think people are really scared of that, so some of us do the opposite and say, "okay, in that case I'll just say yes to almost everything," even if that means working two months in a row and never being home.

"That's definitely a bad model and in a better world, you're in a more structured environment, maybe that wouldn't be the case either. It produces all sorts of bad side effects, not just that people get burned out, it also makes it harder for new talent to come in and test the waters and everything. There's also bad things about it, but I don't actually know what the answer to that is because, you know, no one wants to suddenly be cut out of whatever it is they're doing."

Anders said it took him a long time to get out of the never-say-no mindset, driven by the fear that one day, someone would be a better caster than him. There was a moment, he said, when he realized he didn't have to keep running the race. It was when guys like Henry "HenryG" Greer and Matthew "Sadokist" Trivett started casting more events and becoming more and more popular. Anders said he thought about trying to "beat" them, but realized pretty quickly that their success wasn't affecting his life. He didn't need to run the race because the race never existed.

"I actually think it's a stupid way to live life, to try and be the best at any one given nothing, unless you really are one in a hundred thousand or something," Anders said. "I don't know that many people, actually, I'm not sure if I know any people that I can legitimately say are the best in any one given field. So if that's the goal you've set for yourself, chances are you're not going to be happy. Or at least it'll be like a sort of shaky kind of happiness that can always be pushed around. I would say for me, it's more about wanting to work on cool projects where I can show what I can do. That's enough for me now. If I'm the most popular, or if the majority of people say that I'm the best or something, then great, but if I'm not, as long as I can still show that I can do a good job then I'm actually quite happy doing that. The rest doesn't matter nearly as much to me. That's a good thing, I think."

These days, Anders said just doing the big events and enjoying the games he does cast is enough for him. Maybe newer viewers are less aware of him, but it doesn't really matter. Being the best is impossible, because no one will ever agree on what that means, and either way, someone would eventually overtake you. Instead, Anders is content with not running the race, and living his life as "decently" as possible.

"I've spent a lot of my life trying to figure out how to live a decent life, which I don't think is necessarily easy, and I notice that in people around me too, not many people don't seem to have the answer to how to do that," he said. "But I thought certainly one of the answers was not setting goals for yourself that are almost impossible to fulfill. Saying that you want to be the best in anything is kind of a crazy goal. It's sort of a meaningless goal too, especially because the question is how you define who is the best? Most popular, maybe you could do that, but those aren't always correlated. So I would say that that's just part of a general philosophy of me trying to figure out how to live a decent life."

Daniel Rosen is a news editor for theScore esports. You can follow him on Twitter.