You should stop comparing yourself to other people. But you won’t stop. Because you can’t. Because nobody can.
Self-comparison just happens. Contrary to what any guru might say, nothing can stop its appearance in consciousness. However, once a self-comparative thought appears, we don’t have to follow it all the way down. There is another option.
Much of the time we reflexively follow the thought and dive into the self-critical abyss. Hopefully we snap out of it some time later, worse for the wear and even shorter on time. So much of life is wasted in these fugue states of imaginary rivalry and conflict, fueled by self-comparison. This is truly tragic because it is avoidable, at least in part.
We can’t fully eradicate self-comparison, but if we lessen the duration of the pain it causes, we win back a great deal of lost time. To do this, we have to understand what drives it.
How It Works
We all carry around a verbose narrator that is constantly recounting our autobiography to an audience of one. This chatty raconteur is known as the ego, and it interprets past and contemporary life events in the context of an ongoing saga that places each of us in the center of the universe.
For the ego, the opinions of others, both expressed and imagined, carry tremendous weight, and it depicts the individual as not only the main character in its own narrative, but also as a crucial character in other people’s internal worlds. Billions of these incompatible narratives silently dominate nearly every human mind around us, and everyone’s bespoke soap opera is thematically quite similar.
The narrative generally takes the shape of an underdog story: we harbor unrecognized gifts and talents, but circumstances prevent us from realizing our potential. Powerful forces exploit us to satisfy their needs, but we shall rise up and slay that dragon…some day.
This capillary-tightening story of struggle and redemption is very important to many of us, and we defend our narratives with a litany of specific personal adversities. But of course, literally everyone faces adversity because life is a long series of adversities, punctuated by occasional relief.
This storytelling perpetuates a process that started in infancy, and those who allow it to dominate their minds throughout adulthood slowly bleed themselves of attention and energy. To solve the problem of self-comparison, we have to insistently interrupt this narratological process.
The Wrong Way Out
Staring at curated images of perfection on the internet makes people anxious and depressed. Conventional wisdom dictates that social media is splitting us into tribal binaries and that the only way out is to delete social media and talk to people in real life. However, many of us can’t make these changes because our social lives and livelihoods require some engagement with this technology.
Not only is deleting social media not so easy, but this logic also reinforces the very tribalism it claims to critique and further contribute’s to everyone’s underdog narratives. It slots social media into the role of the proverbial dragon, and once we delete some apps and brag about it, we’ll slay it and bring peace throughout the land.
This advice ignores that these ego-based tribal binaries may slightly predate Facebook. Human history indicates that people have been competing with, hating, and scapegoating each other in the service of their own personal mythologies for some time now. Vaporizing Big Tech won’t bring us back to a natural harmony that never existed in the first place.
Additionally, this conventional wisdom addresses the symptom only at the macro level of society, and it puts unrealistic pressure on the individual to take on Big Tech. No individual can take down an entire system through psychologically hygienic personal choices. However, we can change our lives by changing our minds.
The Way Out
Rather than singlehandedly orchestrating the downfall of the tech gods, we can undermine our own ego narratives from the bottom up. Firstly, we have to accept that self-comparison is hard-wired into us. It derives from our animal ancestry, and it never goes away. If we give into it, we choose to live in a zero-sum world of rivalry that robs us of energy and attention.
Secondly, we must accept that the narrative itself is only in our heads. We all face our own adversities, and everyone from Musk and Bezos on down tends to frame their lives around theirs. But if everyone self-brands as the undermined underdog, then where are all the top dogs?
In fact, the whole narrative is a double cross, and the persecution is an inside job. The ego is the persecutor, and the call is coming from inside the house. Our narrator is the one who makes us feel less-than, and it is the only thing keeping us down.
Ultimately, any time we find ourselves drawn into any narrative about our lives, we have a choice: to follow the narrative, or to see this moment as it truly is, beyond story. All we ever have is the energy and attention available to us right now. When we choose the second option, we can channel that energy and attention into action that will both improve our mood and subvert the underdog narrative.
While the ego can never be killed, it can be starved. When we do things we care about rather than stew over various imaginary shortcomings, we rob it of narrative plot points. This feels really good in the short term, and improves our lives in the long term. The pursuit of our desire empowers us and deprives ego of its life-draining power, one choice at a time.