Don’t Compare Yourself to Anyone Ever

I try not to make promises I can’t keep, but I really am pretty sure I can give you super powers.

I can’t help you fly, or become super strong or super fast (although, follow my lead and you too can become invisible!), but I think what I can provide is better.

What if you could obtain and harness the ability to decide–all by yourself–what made you happy, what you wanted to do, how you wanted to look, and at what pace you would do everything?

Holy shit, right?  Somebody get Stan Lee on the phone.

How cool would that be?  Instead of comparing the entirety of your life to others, you can simply discover what makes you happy, and find ways to fill your life with that.  You wouldn’t be beholden to what somebody else defines as a goal.  You’d be…free.

It would be a super power too, because as is, we’re about as good at this as we are at flapping our arms until we’re airborne.  So it bears repeating: what is right for one person is often totally fucking wrong for you.  Other people’s lives have nothing to do with you. 

We have a reflex to compare ourselves to others because on a biological level, we think this is all a competition for resources.  When we see a stranger carrying a knapsack full of coconuts, we feel an animalistic instinct to wish we had that, and then to club them to death, and run off with their loot.

But over the centuries, we’ve gotten pretty good at not robbing and murdering people, so maybe we can also stop ourselves from constantly comparing ourselves to them.

And maybe we should, because on a real, human level–especially in the first world in 2016–we’re all sharing this shit, we live in an abundant universe, and your neighbor getting evicted doesn’t make your rent any cheaper.  You benefit from doing your best, not from kicking somebody else in the nuts, and farting in their face (although that does remain the funniest option).

Wanting to do well for yourself is great, but to be competitive at life is: 1) To actively want someone else to do poorly (which, what a dick you are), and 2) To lose focus on what you actually want, how well you’re really doing, and how much you like yourself.

This creates what I call Comparison Obsession Disorder (COD), where your life is a miserable series of comparisons to friends, family, and Beyonce.  You try desperately to look as good as models, to make as much as software tycoons, and to be as happy as your friend appears to be in a carefully staged Facebook picture.

And when you fail, you feel like a fat, smelly loser, which in turns makes you less able to actually improve in all of these ways.  Instead, you get on this perpetual cycle of inadequacy and depression, and you wonder why pursuing the world’s idea of bliss never seems to make you feel very blissful.

And by the way, to some degree, nearly all of us are afflicted with COD, and it sucks.  It really sucks.

We compare ourselves more than ever now because, in recent years, Instagram and Facebook came along and injected a pound of steroids straight into the ass cheeks of our COD.  

This is of course ridiculous because we don’t see real life on social media.  You never see Instagrams of couples fighting on vacation, or 30 minute videos of teenage girls taking 400 different selfies before choosing and editing “the right one,” or 30 second videos of teenage boys masturbating to “the right one” even though all of these things are accurate reflections of what peoples’ lives are actually like.

And you know what?  When we think about it, we know this.  We know Instagram is nonsense with a sepia filter.  We know it’s meaningless, fraction-of-a-fraction snippets of the human experience, but our instinct to compare ourselves is so strong, that we stop thinking critically, and forget about it (This is also how we manage to pretend like corn is good for us).  

This is why in a survey for Glamour, 64% of women aged 18-40 said that looking at pictures on social media made them feel worse about their bodies and, in that same survey, 60% of women confessed to doctoring the photos they post.

I mean think about that.  These women know that other women are manipulating their pictures.  They literally compare themselves to what they know is fake, and then feel like shit because they don’t measure up to it. You may as well compare yourself to a stick figure someone drew on MS Paint.

That same Glamour survey found that when asked, “How much more could you weigh and still like yourself?” 60 percent of women put the max at five pounds, and over a third said, “Not an ounce.”

Step back and look at that.  That means approximately NINETY-FUCKING-FIVE PERCENT of women surveyed wouldn’t like themselves if they gained any real weight.  Assuming that’s at all accurate, that means that out of this group of supposedly joyous ladies…

…a grand total of one of them would be okay with gaining some weight in one of her legs.

​The whole “love your body” movement comes from a good place, but you’re never going to convince that 95% that they’re beautiful in a world where Scarlett Johansson is photoshopped to within an inch of her life–not unless the focus moves to not comparing yourself to anyone–at all.

Because this is all COD.  None of this shit would happen on a deserted island.  It’s all entirely about how we feel in relation to others.  It’s not the media’s fault, and it’s not Victoria’s Secret’s fault (they’re cheating at a game you don’t need to play).  It’s our fault for looking at life as a competition–where you look at a girl thinner or more effectively airbrushed than you, and part of you feels like you’re losing.

With all of this said, COD is far from being strictly a female problem.

Men almost universally have the disorder too.  It’s just usually not related to how skinny another guy’s ankles are.  Sometimes it’s over how many girls they’ve boned, or how big their trucks are.  Sometimes it’s over physical strength, or who can dunk their head into a bucket of ice for the longest period of time.  All of them are secretly about who has a bigger dick.

In general, men don’t Photoshop their Instagrams as often, but are more likely to throw a balled up fist at a stranger, because they feel “disrespected.”  It’s just a different brand of pathetic and childish.

Female COD leads to bitter infighting, eating disorders and an overwhelming feeling of inadequacy.  Male COD leads to fistfights, date rape, and Donald Trump.

In both cases, we’d all be well served to change our priorities, and cut this shit out.

Comparing yourself is not only harmful, but it’s also incredibly stupid and misguided.

Let’s remind ourselves of something: The mission of everything you do is mostly happiness.  Sure you probably want to accomplish and contribute good things, and be nice to others, but most of what we’re talking about here is you being happy.

So when you’re comparing your family situation, or your home, or your job to somebody else, what you’re implicitly really comparing is your happiness.  “She’s in Paris?  I want to be in Paris.  By the transitive property, she must be as happy as I want to be!”

But in case you didn’t know, comparing your happiness to others is FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE.  Don’t even think about trying.  You don’t have a rough idea, there’s nothing you can assume.  You have absolutely no clue as to how happy they are.  Holy shit.  You barely know how happy you are.  

Just because someone has a house you want, or a car you want, doesn’t mean that they’re doing better than you.  They could be miserable at their high paying job.  They could hate themselves.  Their rich spouse could be an abusive monster, or really boring, or like Dave Matthews Band.  Or everything could be going great and they could just be dying inside because their brain chemistry is off.

There is no one thing that they have that you need in order to be happy, because nothing like that exists.  Happiness is an endlessly complicated, ever-changing journey, and someone posing in front of somewhere with a nice view doesn’t mean they’re generally feeling better than you.  If you think you know that, you’re a complete fucking idiot.

It’s really, really important that you remember this.  You know as much about how someone is “doing” as you know about black holes (or: if you know a lot about black holes, human interaction).​

But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that everything with your ex/frienemy/cousin is going great, and they are doing, by every objective measure, better than you, and you somehow know this.

​So what?  Who cares?  Why should that have any impact on you whatsoever?

“Because if they have what I want, that means I could have had that too.”  Okay, two things:

1) No shit!  You always could have anything!  We live in an infinite universe where impossible is nothing.  There is a whole world out there waiting for you to take it.  You’re always kind of a failure for not doing that, regardless of how well anyone else does.

2) Dwelling on how well they’re doing helps you how?  No, go on.  I’ll wait.  You tell me what that does for you.  You tell me how your time spent envying their life makes you better.

“It’s motivation.”  Oh so that’s why you want a nice house?  Not because it surrounds you with things you like and provides you with necessities for your family, but because Jerry has one?  What are you, six?

But maybe you’re doing better than some others (again, you don’t know, but for the sake of argument).  Comparing yourself to the peons around you to boost your self-esteem is okay, right?  

No!

Are you kidding?  What an asshole you are.  You can’t be happy about what you have without taking pleasure is somebody else having less?  Jesus, how insecure are you? 

And also, if you’re gaining satisfaction because at least you’re not like your drug addict sex offender cousin who lives in a Whole Foods dumpster, you’re not exactly pushing yourself, are you?

You’ll never progress with that outlook.  At that point you’re the Hare in The Tortoise & The Hare, and newsflash: the Hare is a total jerkoff.

A lot of our comparisons come from comparing our timelines to others.  Others at our high school reunions seem to have their shit together more than you, or a college friend leapfrogs you career-wise, or your frienemy gets pregnant, and you suddenly feel like an 28-year-old decrepit cat lady.

Having children is a particularly weird thing to envy.  “Oh man, I want kids, and she has them.  Why does she have what I want?”

A dude came inside of her.  That’s why.  You could make that happen.  We’re very easy to trick.

But kids are also a super dangerous thing to envy because it is so easy to make them.  You could decide to do it on impulse because you feel you need to “catch up” and that could be terrible.  I mean we all know that about 8 trillion of the world’s problems link back to people having children before they’re ready (i.e. before they have any money, or before they’ve stopped caring about how well their Instagram does), and you don’t get an award for popping one out in accordance with your timeline.

None of this is to say that you shouldn’t care about what you have or where you are in life.  Of course you should.  It’s great to want a big house, or a big family, or a nice, secure savings account.  It’s great to want to take trips, and go skydiving, and it’s especially great to get yourself into a position where if somebody gets sick, that you don’t have to go all Walter White and end up shot to death by your own trunk-machine-gun within a couple years (uh…spoilers).

But you shouldn’t want this because somebody else can take care of their cancer-ridden child.  That just makes you fucking weird.

So how do we compare ourselves less?  Well my thought is this: it’s harder to remember to not do things than it is to do things.  So this is more about how we can focus on ourselves more, and we do this in two ways.

The first is by focusing on how to improve yourself.  Stop aspiring to be others and instead aspire to be the kickass you you’re going to be in two years.  How can you be more considerate, more hard-working and over all less…you know, like you than you currently are?

If you stay focused on this, you will always only improve the person you are, and that is literally just about everything important.

The second way to focus on yourself is to focus on what makes you happy.  You’ll never be satisfied with someone else’s bliss, so stop stealing other peoples’ material.  Don’t be the FatJewish of life. 

Instead, reset.  Step back for a minute, take a breath, shake your sillies out, take a vacation, dunk your head into a bowl of milk–do whatever you need to do to reboot your brain a little bit.  And when you do that, ask yourself what you really, really like and want.

It’s okay to not know at first.  It’s okay to have no idea, because it’s easy to find out.  It’s simple trial and error.  You go on a roller coaster, poop your pants a little, find that unpleasant and go, “Okay, not for me.”

Take some time for you to go on all of your roller coasters.  Figure all of this out.  Do you want a family?  What do you want to spend a lot of time doing?  Where do you want to live?  What do you want to contribute to the world?  How badly do you want satellite radio in your car?

Do you care about any of that?  Because no matter what anybody else says, you don’t have to.  Remember that.  You can totally just work at Wendy’s, and play X-Box, and get a vasectomy (please).

Remember that this life is about you being happy (as long as you don’t like, kill people to be happy), and finding what works for you.  You and you alone get to determine that.

So choose your own journey.  Stop looking into your neighbor’s yard to see what they have.  It’s creepy.  You’re not in competition with your ex, or your siblings, or your high school class.  That’s all in your head.  The only person you need to be better than is you.