In the Modern World, ‘Comparison Really is the Thief of All Joy’
So, last week someone asked me, “Who were the prettiest girls in your high school” and how do they compare to women today? High school has been a minute for me, and it was a bit of an odd question, so it took a moment to come up with the answer.
You see I went through high school in the eighties and it’s very difficult to compare women's looks then to women today. Why? Well, so much of how we judge a woman’s beauty today ends up being how they look on a screen. On a cell phone. On a PC. On Instagram. Well, none of those things existed back then. There were no filters. There was no photoshopping. Women didn’t spend all day watching make-up tutorials on YouTube and looking at how other women pose to get attention.
It was a completely different world, but even then we lived in a different world than most human beings. Let’s go all the way back to the turn of the last century in 1900. TV didn’t exist back then. People mostly traveled by horse or horse-drawn wagon. Because of that, most people typically didn’t go all that far. Most people probably spent the vast majority of their lives less than 50 miles from where they lived. So, for them, the world was much smaller than it is for us.
Who was the prettiest woman they’d ever seen? Some girl they saw at a local dance. Who was the strongest person they knew? One of the farm boys who was bigger and taller than everyone else and spent his life doing outdoor work. Who was the richest man they knew? Some guy who owned the local sawmill and grocery store. There were famous people they’d heard about in the newspapers or on the radio, but what they knew about them was fairly limited, and very, very few of them ever thought, “That could be me.”
Today, the prettiest woman on Earth is probably some genetically gifted 19-year-old from Dubai who works out 6 hours per day, has been looking at Instagram since she was 8, and has all her pictures retouched by a professional. Also, if you’re into weightlifting, you can’t page through social media without seeing a half dozen guys with better-combined benches, squats, and deadlifts than the strongest man on the planet in the sixties and 50 guys with better bodies than some of the fittest people on the planet 100 years ago. The richest people you “know” are now measured in hundreds of billions and they make more every 10 minutes than the richest guy most people knew made in a lifetime a hundred years ago.
The problem with all this is that part of human nature is comparing ourselves to other human beings. Most people don’t even realize how big a part of our lives it is. It’s how most of us form our self-worth, decide if a mate is worth pursuing, or decide whether things are “fair.” It’s an integral part of our self-image and it has a huge impact on how we view the world.
On the one hand, comparison can make us more grateful for the life we have:
However, most people usually go in the opposite direction. There is a reason why “envy” is one of the 7 deadly sins, and also why this Russian proverb exists:
That ugly, unhappy form of comparison is much more natural to the human condition and it’s a big problem in the modern world because today, we’re constantly pummeled in the face with the fact that there are people that are better than us in every imaginable way.
Whoever you are, there’s someone smarter, prettier, stronger, tougher, more famous, more athletic, wealthier, and just plain old more successful in every way possible. Some people hate those people for that reason, but far more people have that hate turn inward.
Certainly, it’s far from the only reason, but it has to be one of the prominent reasons we’ve seen such a massive spike in depression in America. Gallup has only been collecting the numbers of this since 2015, but even in that relatively short period of time you can see the depression levels rapidly climbing upward:
Is this because Elon Musk, the Rock, and Taylor Swift exist and are making the rest of us feel a little inadequate in comparison? To a degree, but of course, it goes a lot deeper than that.
Because we humans care a great deal about how we look to other people, we go all out to give people the best possible view of our lives. So, all your friends and the people you know around town? They always look like they’re having the time of their lives. Every time you get a glimpse of them, they’re with a new girl, on vacation, or at a party. You don’t know that the girl isn’t actually their girlfriend, the vacation was a lot more stressful than they thought and they spent half the party in the corner, standing by themselves. You also don’t know that they’re broke, spend a week out of every month in bed with back pain, or that their marriage sucks because very few people want to present that image of themselves in public.
If you have the wrong mentality for the modern world, this can be depressing. Being “the best” at anything looks nearly impossible, the competition level for anything worthwhile looks extreme and all the people you know in the real world seem like their life is one long highlight reel while you, like all human beings, actually have a lot of moments that aren’t that great.
If this is you, here’s how you make yourself less depressed and improve your life:
1. Stop being jealous and don’t envy people. Instead, applaud their success. Be happy when people do well. That will both put you in a better place to learn from what they’re doing right and put you in a better mood.
2. Decide what you want, what makes YOU happy, and what makes YOUR life better, then get after it. I wrote a whole column about the fact that most people may think they’d like being Elon Musk, but in actuality, they probably wouldn’t enjoy it as much as they think they would. We’re all built differently. We have different dreams. Different goals. Let other people inspire you, but don’t get caught up in trying to copy their life. It might not be as great as you think. There’s a reason impossibly rich and famous movie & rock stars keep dying of drug overdoses. Guess what? It’s not because everything in their life is just as great as it seems from the outside.
3. Last but not least, remember that what you see on social media is a production. It’s not the “real world,” it’s a play with sets, lines, and characters. You don’t know what kind of real drama, angst, and worry is happening behind the scenes and if you did, it probably wouldn’t seem so great. Focus on reaching YOUR potential and making YOUR life along with the lives of people YOU care about as great as possible, not on berating yourself for coming up short of some carefully constructed public image you’re seeing online.
If you want to be a happy person, don’t allow yourself to get all caught up in jealousy, envy, and comparison to other people. Be happy for other people’s success and work on building the best life possible for you and everything else will fall into place.