Our experience is what we agree to attend to.
She gets paid more than I do. He has a more prestigious job than I. Her career advancement has been faster than mine. He’s smarter, funnier, and looks better in a suit. Everything comes so easy to her. She’s in better shape than me. How does she have so many more Instagram followers than I do?
We live in a culture in which we compare ourselves along every imaginable axis of privilege and every dimension of identity.
Our insatiable desire to compare is the product of an accumulation culture — a culture in which the doctrine of everyday life is based on the acquisition or gradual gathering of things. The accumulation of goods. The accumulation of leisure. The accumulation of accolades. The accumulation of wealth.
The problem with our incessant drive to accumulate is that it comes at the expense of our own being. It inevitably leads to the deprivation of self because there is always more. There is, and always will be, someone with more money. Someone smarter. Someone better looking.
When we surrender to the accumulation culture and relent to the constant juxtaposition of ourselves and those around us, we relinquish our most elemental form of agency — the agency to shape the experiences of our life.
The moment you focus on others, you vacate your soul.
The only way to resist is to realize that only those items which we choose to notice shape our mind. Selective interest and attention prevent us from falling into the comparison trap.
We each must develop an inner barometer for our own values. When we have the courage to intentionally tend to the things that we find important, we have the power to shift our posture from merely identifying what is lacking to envisioning ways to create and shape the world we want to live in.
A flower does not think of competing with the flower next to it. It just blooms.