The thief of joy
I think a lot of people have someone in their life that they compare themselves to. Could be a sibling, a friend, an ex-colleague - even someone that they don’t know at all but whose career and life is available to follow via the media. Usually there’s some key thing that they have in common; often age, but perhaps also background, career or family choices. And this person, entirely unbeknownst to them, can cause the individual who is making the comparison a lot of angst as they wonder why their life isn’t a bit more like the subject of their envy.
I think we all know, in our heart of hearts, that nothing good can come from this. Wondering why someone you don’t know at all has a more senior job title than you is a waste of energy - and yet many of us will do it anyway, whilst simultaneously knowing it’ll only cause us pain. But the reality is, we are born into a society which lures us into this way of thinking from the earliest of ages - parents often speak proudly when a child learns to walk or talk at a particularly early age, whilst those whose children hit these milestones later are often afflicted by a vague sense of worry that something isn’t right. No matter how many people say that it’s not a race and children develop at their own pace, and we know, logically, that whether your child walks at nine months or eighteen months will make no difference at all in the scheme of their lives, a sense of comparison can easily begin to creep in.
The place where this shows up more than anywhere is school - where you are literally sat in the same space as people the same age as you and given a mark or grade which you can compare with theirs. Writer and thinker Sir Ken Robinson (whose TED talk “Do schools kill creativity?” has been watched millions of times) says: “The fact is that given the challenges we face; education doesn’t need to be reformed — it needs to be transformed. The key to this transformation is not to standardise education, but to personalise it, to build achievement on discovering the individual talents of each child, to put students in an environment where they want to learn and where they can naturally discover their true passions.” I’m with Ken - the sense that there’s a single form of intelligence or achievement that’s valued can make us feel like we’re all in a race aiming for an illusory finish line.
The reality - of course - is that everyone wants to get something slightly different out of life and their journeys towards it are unique. Even for people who are pursuing the same career or goal, some will start with more advantages than others purely because of their demographic profile (for example, this video literally uses the scenario of a race to illuminate the concept of structural racism) and layered on top of this there will be significant variation depending on the particulars of every individual’s life. Perhaps career goals had to be put on hold to care for a parent, a partner or a friend, or perhaps a family member’s work or circumstances resulted in a move to a completely different location, necessitating putting down new roots and finding a new job. And whilst none of us want exactly the same things out of life, we still live in a culture which seems to value certain ways of living above others.
Knowing the above is unlikely to help us if we’re prone to comparison - like scrolling mindlessly through social media, we know it’s a bad idea, but we find ourselves powerless to stop doing it. So I think the more interesting question we can ask ourselves is why we compare ourselves to the person or people that we do, and what do we feel when we do so? If we start to interrogate our tendencies, we may end up learning something about ourselves - why, for example, are we comparing ourselves unfavourably to someone who has managed to hold down a 9-to-5 and write a novel on the side? Do we secretly harbour unfulfilled ambitions to write a novel? Do we resent the amount of time that work is taking up in our life, and would love to find another passion that we could pursue in the evenings and on the weekends? Or are we actually pretty happy with our work/life set up but envy the admiring looks and comments our rival gets when they talk about their writing accomplishments? Each of these things leads us to a different action we could take - we could sign up to a creative writing course, we could join a pickleball team to help us reclaim our evenings, or we could talk to our therapist / patient friend about how we could care less about what other people think of us.
On a recent episode of the podcast The Rest is Entertainment, the hosts discuss the publication of the New York Times’s list The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, and whether lists of this nature are a good or useful thing. When you interrogate the principles even for a second, a feature claiming to have nailed the 100 best books is mad - whilst I’m delighted that Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend nabbed the top spot, it’s not the same as someone winning a gold medal for an objectively faster time in the pool or on the track. The fact that Ferrante’s novel is up there tells us more about the people who compiled the list than the list itself, given that comparing works of art is a hugely subjective exercise. But what’s fun about lists (as the hosts of the aforementioned podcasts argue) is that they’re a talking point. You might be outraged that a book you loved hasn’t been included, you might see a novel that you thought was pretty average make the top ten, and you might spot something that you’d never normally read, but the fact that it’s next to another book that you love inspires you to pick up a copy. The list itself is not really the point - it’s the thoughts and actions that it inspires in readers that matter. I think we should treat our tendencies to compare a bit like this - rather than just miserably feeling inferior, we can interrogate what’s being brought up and if there’s anything we can do about it and, by doing so, making comparison the bringer of joy, rather than the thief of it.