A Sure Way to Feel Miserable

There are methods that genuinely make us happier, and there are ones that reliably make us miserable. And the most foolproof of the second kind is comparing your life with the lives of other people.

You could argue that comparison gives us motivation, a bit of competition, a spark of drive. The wish to be better than others feeds our ego and our ambition. There’s some truth to that — but it’s worth separating two kinds of comparison.

1. The destructive way

Destructive comparison is when we envy the outward life of others — the ones who look richer, prettier, more famous, more successful, smarter, younger, happier, and so on. Sometimes we hear these stories from friends and acquaintances; sometimes we draw our conclusions from talking to people directly. As for the perfect lives in the media and on TikTok — I won’t even start; everyone there is “the very best.” It always seems the grass is greener next door. We listen to the glowing stories and the life advice, forgetting that every frog praises its own swamp.

For a while I lived in Dubai, and at first there was a stretch when I started to feel like a loser — meeting new people, listening to their success stories and taking them on faith. My anxiety climbed to its absolute ceiling. Soon I felt better, once I’d seen for myself that in ninety-nine percent of cases those stories were wildly exaggerated.

On the other hand, some people see me as a symbol of success, and even tell me how they envy me — after all, my life supposedly has “no problems.” But the moment I describe even the surface of my own struggles, conflicts and bitter experiences, the wish to “step into my skin” evaporates that very second.
It’s the same with the other people who strike us as ideals: almost always there are dark sides, problems and “skeletons in the closet” we’d never want to inherit. I know people whose lives, on certain measures, are far cooler than mine — and yet I would not trade places with them under any circumstances.

Comparing your life too much brings nothing but anxiety, lowers your self-worth, leads to procrastination and apathy, and pushes us to chase someone else’s goals, stripping us of our own identity.

2. The positive way

The positive way is the pragmatic search for specific values and qualities in other people (or even historical figures), thinking them through, and building and following a plan to grow those qualities in yourself. For this, it’s worth not being stingy and taking your bearings straight from the outstanding examples — Marcus Aurelius, Jobs, Musk, Gandhi. But from there, compare yourself only with yourself: how far you’ve moved over some period on the metrics that matter to you. The main thing is to focus on your own progress and to practice gratitude, toward yourself and toward the world. There’s no room here for destructive emotions or for trying to prove something to anyone.

“Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.” — Jordan B. Peterson

Our particular blend of values, skills, thoughts, material and physical qualities, at any given moment, makes us absolutely unique. It’s worth valuing that and not being shy about being yourself under any circumstances. Hearing yourself, and understanding what happiness actually means to you. Here and now we are who we are — and tomorrow we’ll be a little better.

There will always be those who accept us and walk our path with us, and those who don’t. That’s their choice, and often it isn’t ours to influence.

Here’s to enjoying what we have, and growing every day without looking back and without regrets! 😎