Is comparing with others a bad thing?

Is comparing with others a bad thing?

The shortest possible answer to the question “Is comparing with others a bad thing?” Is – NO!

Before you jump on to me and point to the loads and loads of literature on not comparing ourselves with others, answer the following questions honestly 

• Have you never compared with others?  
• If you truly stopped comparing, on what would you base your standards and values?

Why we compare?

Humans survived and evolved by comparing with the other humans around them. How so? If in the days of the caveman you were alone, you would soon die. So you compared with the others in the group. Do I fit in? Am I doing the same thing as my neighbor to survive? Am I contributing enough? Am I following the rules of the group? 

Fast forward to modern life – we are now hooked to the entire population of the planet – it is no longer a small tribe. Our groups are enormous today, and we carry with us devices that constantly feed us with information from all over the planet, which is largely irrelevant to us. Unfortunately, we did not develop the discernment needed to weed out the relevant from the irrelevant, and we are still constantly comparing our survival needs to something very abstract and irrelevant to our survival and end up with forever feeling “not enough”

Human worth, self-worth is incalculable!

Our caveman mind cannot stop comparing; that is a good thing because we still need standards and values. We also need to continue evolving and bettering our lives to more fulfilling ones. Simultaneously, we need to move forward to the modern man concept of self, self-esteem, and self-worth. Each of us is now a complex and unique amalgamation of positive, negative, and neutral traits. These traits can be either skill you have or attributes you have. What follows is that the worth for any human is incalculable. 

Thus, when we compare with others, we are comparing one (or a few) of these traits, but then we fall into the folly of basing our entire self-worth on this single trait and label our entire self as not good enough. 

That is not fair! 

If you are to compare, you have to compare similar things. You can compare a skill – He is good at basketball. You can compare an attribute – she weighs less than me. But if you give yourself a global label of not good enough based on such a comparison, it is unequal. 

Wherever a client comes up with an “I am not good enough” statement, I immediately follow it up with “Please, complete the statement. You are not good enough at/for?” 

Here are three things which comparing helps us with

Comparing shows us what is possible – you watch someone do something well and say wow! How is he doing it? Can I also do it?  

Comparing makes us competitive in a good way – being competitive doesn’t mean you want the other person to fail. It just means you want the same level of success as the other person. Success makes your quality of life better, and failure will not make your quality of life better – it is not a label on you as a person.

Comparing makes you more grateful –   Studies now show that people who do are more likely to help others, volunteer, or work toward alleviating social injustice because of their awareness of their blessings. Awareness of your blessing can only come with a downward comparison.

So forget what your mother, teacher or priest told you — it’s more than OK to compare  with others, it’s great. Comparing helps you improve in the future and can make you happier about where you are right now.

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