Comparison is a happiness killer.
I know that it is very tempting to compare yourself to other people. No matter if it’s about your work, your skills or your private life. You want to succeed, you aspire to be your best, and in the process, you are looking at the people who are successful, comparing your life to their life.
Of course, it’s completely fine to have role models, but what happens when you condition yourself too much on striving to be like them? If you compare too much and in the wrong way, it is likely you
When is comparison bad?
When the thought of somebody else brings you down and makes you feel bad about yourself. They look so happy and successful, and they are so much “better”… you become jealous.
What you do here is comparing your life to a different life. It can now lead to a striving to get what the other person has or to become like that person, or it ends in negligence of yourself; you may loose motivation and maybe, when it goes to extremes, you may start hating yourself.
What are the consequences?
After some time you will notice that you cannot be like them and get upset even more. Why are they always better and why can’t you be that good? Why don’t you have that skill? You want so much more, and you’re too ambitious to back down because they surely have never backed down to get there, right? So you keep working, keep getting upset over and over again and you loose your self-satisfaction.
You end up in a vicious circle: you are living the life of somebody else and are loosing yourself. You loose your joy in life.
Why can’t we be like them?
- We often only see the surface. We believe too quickly what we see, and we only notice what we see. What brought those people there? What have they gone through to reach what they have? Maybe they have worked their asses off and have failed a total of 100 times prior to what they are doing now, or maybe they just got extremely lucky?
- They are entirely different people with entirely different stories. Everybody works differently, everybody reacts differently. Everybody is different. So our life cannot be their life.
Basically, we compare ourselves to things we don’t know.
Living a lie
We can never be sure if those people even truly have what we desire. It is possible that they are not happy with where they are in life and what they have either. We assume they must be incredibly happy and they should never complain. So, if we know those people and we catch them complaining, we get worked out about it and blame them because they “have everything”. In most cases, this is just a lie we tell ourselves. Nobody’s perfect, and everybody’s got problems. Nobody’s life is all puppies and kittens. Everybody has problems.
Somebody else’s life
The reason why comparison makes us unhappy is that we just won’t reach what we aspire to if it’s found in the life of somebody else. We cannot live the life of somebody else because we cannot be like anybody else! It’s obvious that we can’t, and it’s perfect that we can’t. We should not be like anybody else, because then we are robbing the world of ourselves.
The truth is, you are not living your own life. You loose your own standards by taking those of somebody else.
Everybody is different, and their dream should not be your dream. Their life is theirs and your life is yours.
How to stop the comparing
- Be grateful. Take some time to look at what you have and what you have achieved so far. Value yourself and your hard work. When you are grateful for what you have, it becomes less likely to be jealous of what others have.
- Decide to be you. Be individual and get to know yourself and what you truly need. Invest in your self-love
- Don’t believe the surface and always question. Be educated about the fact that every success needs work and commitment and everybody starts small.
No go find and live your own dream.
Related: The importance of dreams in your life
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