Comparing yourself to others. (same age)

[aFireInside]

I do this allot, I remember stef talking a little about it . 

But it is still something that I'm confused on . 

 

There are two sides. (maybe )

 

1. don't compare yourself to anyone , do your own thing. 

 

2. compare yourself to others to see if you are stagnating, and or give yourself an idea of where you are. 

 

 

 

When i do it, it gets me pumped up and i want to get out there and enjoy life. 

But then i realize I'm stuck in a rut then I end up felling bad. 

 

 

Most people around my age are at least enjoying there life. (20's) 

[Kevin Beal]

It seems perfectly reasonable to me to compare yourself to others.

 

A couple of potential problems that I see are around evaluating your own self worth based on the judgments of other people, and finding yourself adopting standards on the basis that other people have them.

 

So for example, I would justify drinking every night on the basis that lots of people my age did that away at college or at the bars or whatever.

 

When I was in school, I would feel worthless looking at the guys who had girlfriends or did a lot of flirting. There was an expectation on me that I'd do that same, but I was too overwhelmed with anxieties, fears of rejection and this sort of thing and I was failing that standard. And I thought that I should, that it was a good standard that I was miserably failing.

 

The good part of comparing, I think, is in reference to your own goals. I might feel envy or admiration of someone around my age who achieved something like what I want to achieve, and in comparing I see what skills or experience they developed and potentially adopt similar strategies. Or find out that it was at great cost to them and then reassess my own goals.

 

I think a good distinction is if the comparing is in reference to your own goals and standards or that of others.

 

Hopefully that makes some sense.

[Wuzzums]

Comparing yourself to others is fine but don't confuse their values for yours.

[aFireInside]

Thanks that clears things up . 

 

I do have some goals , like being happy .. 

But I understand now that my values are different and i shouldn't confuse values with goals. 

 

 

 

thanks again : )

[RealP]

I'm going through the same thing, and I notice that you have been posting about this subject lately. Would you and anyone else be interested in doing a Skype call?

[dsayers]

Just out of curiosity, why the differentiation of "same age"? Looking to the older has advantages like giving you something to strive for you might not have considered or avoiding a pitfall you didn't recognize as being so perilous. Looking to the younger can give you a fresh perspective on things we take for granted and/or serve a reminder of how many burdens can be self-inflicted.

[MysterionMuffles]

Comparisons are also self sabotage because you're making more or less of your self or the other person.

 

If you envy that they appear more successful than you, then you feel less successful with your life.

 

If you feel superior to them because you are smarter than them, you diminish their capacity for intelligence in your own perception of them.

 

I think we're all of a Ying and Yang balance with each other. When I first graduated high school, I had the tendancy to compare my self to everyone else who was hopping onto University or College, or even full time work, while I took the time to unschool my self. But I didn't see it as unschooling for the first little while. I saw my self as lazy and unmotivated while everyone else was getting ahead in life. Then I started talking to these people and they weren't even happy about all the studying they had to cram into their lives and their jobs not even being that personally rewarding...

 

It was an eye opener for me but I just realized that comparing yourself to others is just self sabotage. We're all better or worse than each other at varying degrees.

I think you can compare objectively just to see those vast differences between yourself and someone else, but never so much when your self worth is at stake is all I'm saying.

[Guest Exceptionalist]

Determine your own capacity. Define your goals. Then assess based on the achievments of others whether you are able to reach them and want to make the sacrifices. Don't just see the benefits without the costs.

[bootoo]

I think we will lack information about almost everybody else to be able to make a fair comparison and will fill the gaps with projections of our own insecurities and all

 

I try to compare myself to a higher ideal

 

I have noticed my ability to accurately assess other people has improved since comparing THEM to the higher ideals rather than comparing to myself

[MysterionMuffles]

I think the only person worth comparing yourself to is yourself. I may be wrong, but in my experience, the only way I've improved my habits and overall mindset was to compete with my past self. Not others. They have their own journey.

[Kevin Beal]

I think the only person worth comparing yourself to is yourself. I may be wrong, but in my experience, the only way I've improved my habits and overall mindset was to compete with my past self. Not others. They have their own journey.

Would you say that such comparisons are basically always tied to evaluating your own self worth? Like in order to be comparing in the first place we must hold whatever we are comparing as a value, and so someone whoever has had more success in that area would logically be more valuable in that area? And so we are by comparison less valuable. Something like that?

 

Not to say that you are right or wrong, mostly because I don't know, right (it's the first time I've considered what you said), but I wonder how avoidable this really is. From reading different things about human and primate psychology it seems that we make these comparisons pretty much all day long unconsciously. How handsome or strong or rich or whatever other status indicators all processed in the blink of an eye and conditioning how we respond in certain situations and even the roles we adopt in those circles.

 

Assuming that I know what I'm talking about, it would seem to me that the best thing would to make these comparisons conscious so that we have an opportunity to weigh them against principles, and if we're doing it anyway, then it's more that we are just learning about ourselves. And possibly even an aversion to comparing yourself could result in suppression / repression.

 

Does that make sense? I don't know.

 

I gather that you've had some negative results from comparing yourself to other people, but I wonder if it's really the comparing that was the problem. I mean, I think a very strong argument could be made that your unschooling (versus their college / full-time work) was actually the wisest choice. The comparison could have been that you were doing important work that they weren't even conscious enough to consider, if you looked at it from a different perspective.

 

I'll just be honest that I have a strong bias. Specifically that I've considered envy to be a strong motivator in my life. I credit envy with my above average guitar playing and singing, my decent logical rigor, the minor successes I've had in my web development career. The things I identify with most.

 

I'm not very aware of what the potential problems are beyond what I've already mentioned in my previous post, so I'd be interested to hear you elaborate on things to look out for

 

[MysterionMuffles]

Yeah I think you understood my post pretty well. From here, I also think a new discussion can be brought up in terms of good and bad envy. There needs to be a positive word for envy like...admiration perhaps? There are times I can compare my self to say, one of my favourite bands, I can compare not our level success, rather dedication to our creative work. I got huge self knowledge from this topic: Idol Worship and Meetings Gods in the Flesh in that regard.

 

The fact that I had to compare my self to them made me uneasy because although I would like to think the band and I are very passionate about respected projects, I realize the root of some fanboyism in me was due to negative envy. I felt unworthy of their presence because although I'd like to think we're equal in creativity, they have pushed theirs further to the point that they get to play shows almost every night and garner some decent coin from it all.

 

At the end of the thread, I came to terms to how equal I am to these people. That was my initial mindset meeting with them, that they're human just like me. But an unconscious level, the negative envy struck me at the snap of the photo: my admiration for them has become envy because I'm jealous that they've been able to gain success from their creative work. Meanwhile, I'm still stuck in obscurity and unnoticed by the literary world or music industry.

 

It's like that negative envy only works to diminish the ego into thinking "I can't achieve that, there must be something special about them." Whereas if I had positive envy, ie admiration, I would be motivated to have talked to them longer and pick their brains a bit. And even get to the point where I am so enamoured by their success and down to Earthiness that I feel compelled to compete against them in that friendly kind of way.

 

The friendly kind of way I think can only be useful, at the end, with only your past self. To compete against old habits and mindsets and become a better you rather than a better musician/author/artist or whatever when it comes to comparing yourself to someone else in a nearly similar situation as you.

 

I don't know if that makes sense, I feel very unclear about my own post. For now that's what I have, but I promise to be more clear in my next one if this does not suffice.

[Kevin Beal]

That's an interesting perspective. I don't think I've ever drawn a distinction like that before.

 

This is obviously my interpretation and emotional experience and whether or not it truly helped me hasn't been measured in any way, but I experienced a lot of envy in my teens around people who played guitar better than me. I felt a mild resentment about how much more skilled they were, and in my vanity just accepted that "well, I could do that too, and better!" and because I wanted it to be the case. I practiced the hell out of the guitar and became, I don't know, better than most I suppose. Good enough for my own satisfaction, anyway.

 

When I first started out in web development I felt inadequate compared to all the people who could actually make forms, knew how to do things cross-browser and this sort of thing. I thought I could never get a good job doing it unless I got infinitely better than I was. I would listen and see all the people in this community, Stef and people generally in the industry that were doing software and how cool that must be for them. I didn't have the same resentment, but I was definitely envious and so I started practicing every day and now I'm at the point where I'm pretty impressed with myself.

 

I don't know if the envy in both these cases was what would qualify as good envy or not, or it could be that there were other more important motivators I'm not considering, but I'm inclined to believe that it was envy generally that motivated me to achieve the little successes that I have.

[MysterionMuffles]

Maybe just the biological drive to out alpha the other indegenuous fawna? I dunno. I think competition is a pretty healthy thing to engage in, provided that you don't take it too personally. To me it sounds like you wanted to compete with these guys and it motivated you to improve, but in the end just for your own satisfaction which is what it always comes down to anyway. You can compare yourself to your own satisfaction or dissatisfaction.