Comparison Is The Thief Of Joy

(2/10) This story forms the second part of a 10-part article series, exploring the imperfect pursuit of happiness. Subscribe to The Hard Truth to be notified of the next article.

As she stands on the stage, she subtly looks down towards her year 6 school uniform without letting anyone see. Keeping the smile plastered on her face, she starts to do a mental count of how many ribbons she has pinned across her chest. She notices she has so many that they don’t all quite fit across the front of her school uniform. She feels a ping of glow inside. She takes a quick glance, without anyone noticing, at her peer’s uniforms. Most of them only with a few ribbons, but not as many as her. The glow brightens. She can hear her mums voice in her head…‘Oh, look at how many ribbons you have! You’re my special little girl.”

In my endeavor to figure out what it means to ‘be happy’, I thought the best place to begin would be to figure out what ‘being happy’ meant. What does it even mean to be happy? As we naturally do, I started with google. Happiness definition, I typed away. An answer appeared…The state of being happy. Very useful, thank you, Google.

What I began to realise quickly was the more I searched for what happiness meant, the vaguer it became. It felt broad, and intangible, but ironically, I realised how this undefinable feeling was something we all pursued.

As I began to tell others how I felt, I realised I wasn't alone in feeling like I was in a constant chase for this mystical feeling of happiness.

It became apparent that many of us feel as though we operate in a state of functioning, moving one foot in front of the other, without consciously realising how much each action or decision brings us joy.

More poignantly, it became apparent through conversations that many people’s unhappiness came as a result only once they compared themselves to those around them. It seemed the equation of unhappiness involved a sort of comparison to others, whereby our success, happiness, and sense of self was reliant on our evaluation of how we are tracking compared to those around us.

The comparisons we make of ourselves to others becomes a core component of defining how happy we are.

I was no exception to this experience. If I looked at my life on its own, and in isolation from the world around me, I felt a great sense of contentment of where I was and what I had achieved in my life. I had done a lot, I had achieved a lot, I am a good person, I was fortunate in many ways. I was happy with who I am.

But I noticed that as soon as I let myself think about what else I could be doing, or what others are doing, I begun to feel this big part of why I was feeling so unhappy.

In my mind, I wasn’t doing enough compared to others, I wasn’t smart enough compared to others, I wasn’t pretty enough compared to others. Nothing was ever enough, once I compared my life to everyone around me.

The Comparison Trap

This wasn’t the first time I realised this or come across this concept that comparison was the thief of joy, originally coined by Theodore Roosevelt. It is a concept that I had pondered many times as part of my endeavours to write something about it. This realisation though got me thinking though...if it is the comparison that takes our joy, I wanted to figure out how do we prevent us from getting get caught up in this idea that our own lives happiness is defined by what others are doing.

This idea of comparing ourselves to others isn’t new. We all use reference points to navigate the world and how we feel about certain situations. It is part of the human experience, which starts as early as childhood. We watch our parents, the significant others in our lives, to learn how to behave, think and our beliefs of the world. As we grow into adolescence and adulthood, when thinking about how content we are, we have two main reference points that can affect our happiness in everyday life.

The first reference point is that of our own past self, and in this, we essentially ask ourselves ‘Am I better off than my past self?’. This might be financially, in relationships, and in our careers. ‘Do I feel as though I’ve learned, progressed, grown in these areas compared to where I was before?’

A lot of the time, we see ourselves with an expectation of a linear progression in life – we get promotions, we make more money, we buy better things with that money, we build deeper relationships, and so forth. This linear progression makes us feel like we are moving forward, progressing in a socially acceptable way.

The main way that this reference point fails us is when we are confronted by career changes, relationship breakdowns or an experience that essentially doesn’t follow a status quo. We think, as we receive redundancies, we go through divorces, that we might be going backwards compared to our past selves, but much of the time, as we go through these types of situations, we grow from them. We learn from them, we bounce forward, and very quickly, our hindsight reminds me of why we went through that pivot point in life. It feels a little less sticky.

Where I find we get stuck, however, is the second reference point where we compare ourselves to that of others – our social reference point. This is where we ask ourselves ‘Am I doing better than those at a similar point in life to me?’, where we tend to use our chronological age to compare ourselves to others. ‘Have I got a better job?’, ‘Does my family seem better off?’, ‘Do I feel like I look as young as others?’.

Many of us may not want to admit that these questions consciously or subconsciously cross our minds, but a lot of these thoughts come across our mind as we scroll our screens, attend events, or even run into old friends at the grocery store. We can even use this point of reference with our current friends – ‘Do we have a bigger house?’ ‘Are our salaries the same?’ ‘Do they have more friends than me?’

?Far too often, we are told that everyone is happier or more successful than ourselves. We are told that the grass is greener elsewhere, but we aren’t reminded that where we are now can also have green grass too.

Whether we like it or not, as humans, we naturally engage into self-comparison, particularly when we are in the throes of youth as we figure out lives out.

Down the rabbit hole of social media...

However, the biggest difference today to that of decades ago is that we weren’t able to access this information as readily as now, and so much of the time, our main (and only) reference point was our past selves. We didn’t have the opportunity to scrutinise our progress with endless feeds of other people’s lives. We didn’t have influencers, young entrepreneurs, or content creators that remind us constantly of what we ‘could be’.

?As we scroll through social media on any given day, what might have been a good day so far, suddenly we are reminded how unpretty, unfunny, unenergetic, uncreative we are compared to these strangers on the internet. The internet becomes a place to remind us of what we are not.

What is also important to acknowledge is that our reference points move with us. Let’s use a simplistic example. Say we have no followers on a social media account, we might have a goal to reach 10k followers. Once we reach this, we focus on the other accounts that have 50k followers, and instead of relishing in our joy for getting 10k followers for too long, we feel deflated by the fact we don’t have 50k. Then, once we get 50k followers, we realise we don’t have 100k, then once we get 100k followers, we use the people with 300k followers as the reference point, and the vicious cycle continues.

This concept isn’t isolated to social media followers – this is simply an example that provides a way of understanding moving reference points. We conveniently forget our reference points as we progress, and suddenly we give ourselves new reference points that only show us that we as not as successful or as happy as someone else.

The hard truth is that there is always someone who we are going to perceive as doing better. Therefore, we create ourselves this never-ending, impossible task to feel happy in who we are and what we’ve achieved by comparing ourselves to a false reality.

?All of these realisations in combination, brought me to a point in my search in learning how to be happy – I thought about why are we attached to comparing ourselves at the cost of our own joy? What is it that makes us drawn to this process, to finding out what others are doing, only to make ourselves feel less than, to feel as though we aren’t doing or being enough in the world.

Where this led me is the realisation that many of us, in the face of comparison overload, have a learned desire to be exceptional.

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Follow Camille Davey as the founder of Grow Together Now, partnering with organisations on making mental health practical and meaningful in the workplace through evidence and lived experience.

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