The Curse of Comparison
The quickest path to depression is to compare yourself to others…and we do it all the time. It’s even worse when you tell people how independent you are and how you don’t care what others think…that’s just reminding people how good you are so they will admire you…same problem.
Our happiness is relative…relative to what or who we compare ourselves to. We are all striving to achieve more with our lives, and that is great. The problem arises when we compare what we have achieved to what others have achieved.
Back in the dim dark days before internet and social media, we compared ourselves to our friends, our business associates, and what we read in the news. With the internet and the explosion of social media we now have the pain of comparing ourselves to almost anyone in the world.
We all think we are independent, we all believe we don’t care what others think…but we do. Deep down our survival instinct wants acceptance from others because there is safety in numbers, the outcast never survives. Of course this comparison (or safety in numbers) provides us no measure of survival in the modern world. What it does is create a gulf between where we are and where we think we should be. Where we think we should be comes from our comparison to others and their seemingly amazing lives on social media.
There is only one instance that comparison is good and that is when you compare yourself to the person you were yesterday.
