Stop Comparing Yourself To Others
As homo-sapiens, we can’t help but compare ourselves to others. It's natural. It’s just a human thing to do. Even if we don’t mean to, we compare ourselves to others. Particularly, we compare our lives, our accomplishments and our looks to other people’s. We wonder why we can’t look the way someone else does, or why we can’t have a job, career or a lifestyle that somebody else possesses. We compare our talents to other people’s, and wonder why we can’t complete a task as easily as someone else can.
It becomes so easy to obsess over the lives of other people, especially in a society full of internet based lifestyles, and easy access to social media. Pretty photos of 'ideal people' and stories of great adventures we wish we could do are constantly shared in our view. Even though we only see a tiny portion of a person’s life online, we for some reason assume that they have it all together. Because realistically no one has it together, we all are dealing with something different to others.
Comparison is evil, a theif of joy and the worst thing we can do for our confidence. It makes us feel like we are constantly not good enough, and that there is always something better to accomplish because somebody else has done it, or we think we should look like another person because they receive a lot of positive attention. We strive to be like other people that we would admire, which is a positive thing to an extent, but in the process, we can lose ourselves.
We start putting ourselves down because we are not like this ideal we have in our minds. The more we compare, the more we reduce the goodness in ourselves and stop seeing how great we already are.
Our society gives us online access to what we believe is the full portrait of a person’s life, and we are unfortunately often subtly encouraged to compare ourselves to others. Why are we comparing ourselves to people in the public who seem to have their life together – people who are just as human as you or I? We all have accomplishments and beautiful features, and being famous with help from teams of people to construct a very particular image shouldn’t be what we compare ourselves to. Because what we see may not even be the full picture, like the YouTuber, you admire is most likely to be having bad days just everyone else, we are in control with what we put out to the world and that's not always the full, so called perfect picture.
What you do matters just as much as what your favourite celebrities do. There are always going to be people in the world who have less or more than you, who might be better or worse than you at something. And you know what? There are people out there who wish they have the same things that you have. There is no need to compare yourself to others, because every life is individual and unique. Own your struggles, your fears, your accomplishments.
Own who you are, flaws and all. Let's be real here: there isn't going to be someone like me, someone who falls in love with fictional characters. Or like you. Everyone has a story. Everyone is different, has different hobbies, different tastes in music etc and that's a good thing, we don't need to be the same because that would be boring. We are all a work in progress and at different stages in our lives.
My goal this month and onwards is stop comparing myself to those around me, someone i think has their life together, because i may be at a different stage to those around me and thats okay, i'm a work in progress. I'm good enough the way i am being my uniquely flawed self.
The only person you should be comparing yourself to is who you were yesterday.
