When you are young, you learn quickly that everything you do is appraised against your peers. It starts with development milestones, the first step, hopefully before 12 months, then the first word. In school, you are ranked. There’s a first, and there’s a last. When you are mischievous in school, you are reminded that your older sibling was a saint (at least this was the case for me). And on and on it goes, in every way you are being compared to your parents, siblings, cousins, friends, classmates, and even geniuses in newspapers you don’t know.
You learn quickly that performance is not about how well you do, but how well you do relative to others. Understandably, this is how the world works. Forbes ranks people based on wealth, Sports Leagues rank clubs, teams, and individuals based on the points they earn, most companies rank their workers. It helps us promote and demote accordingly, it serves as a guide to the best and worst, it brings order.
For many, this order is distorted after school.
When I left university, I realized there was no longer a concrete path to follow. There were still the expectations I had of myself, and my community of me, to get a ‘good’, well-paying, and prestigious job, pick a good path and lead a good life. ‘Good’ probably meant something similar to my peers, preferably better.
At the end of my first year out of school, there was no grade to let me know how well I had done, no official ranking system. It would have been a good time to do away with the system in its entirety. Unfortunately, our generation has social media, and if you pay enough attention to LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter, it’s not that hard to continue the ranking game. It’s a force of habit.
When you think you’re doing better than the class of people you have termed your peers, it’s an ego boost. If you think you’re doing worse, it’s deflating. Everyone eventually experiences this deflation, because someone, somewhere always seems to be doing better. “Comparison is the thief of joy.” — Teddy Roosevelt
For your mental health and confidence, this constant comparison sucks. But habits ingrained since childhood are difficult to break, it’s almost innate. You hear what someone earns, and you think of what you earn. You see the car someone drives, and you think of yours. Someone buys a house, and you think of how much of a deposit you’ve saved or not. It’s not that you can’t be happy for others’ success, but that our default wiring is to compare their success to ours.
Comparing is simply what we do, but I have learned that reframing the way we compare might just be able to bring some of that stolen joy back. One way I have practiced reframing comparison is through working out. Years ago I decided I wanted to run a marathon (right now this goal feels impossible and saying this makes me feel like I’m jinxing it), every time I’d get on the track again, I’d give up after a few sessions. I’d look at my end goal, and wonder how I’d ever run 26 miles if I was struggling to run a mile. This year, that shifted, I stopped comparing myself to my eng goal, or other amazing athletes and started comparing myself to where I was the week before. The excitement and joy of minor achievements have kept me going, and although I am nowhere near 26 miles, I am not a ‘mile and pass out’ runner anymore. That is an achievement only realized through comparison.
This has started happening in other areas of my life, too. I like to rate areas of my life, work, finances, relationships, mental health, etc. My outlook on life is currently a 5 out of 10 and I told my sister about it the other day.I started tearing up because of how happy I was. She didn’t seem particularly impressed. To be fair to her, she’s going through ‘life’ at the moment too. But I felt over the moon. On any standard scale, a 5 out of 10 is abysmal, and previously I would have noted that and felt deflated, but given where I am coming from, a 5 is amazing, and hopefully, someday soon, I will celebrate a 6.
Competing with everyone else, and living in comparison with others, is an impossible battle to win, but competing with ourselves, comparing yesterday’s version to today, or last year to this, there’s a lot of joy that can be found there. In the words of the great Cardi B, “I’m my own competition, I’m competing with myself.” And that’s how I am living from here on out. So help me God (let’s not get cocky).
