Who to compare yourself with

People are unhappy at the bottom. They get sick there and remain unknown, and unloved. They waste their lives there. They die there. In consequence, the self-denigrating voices in the minds of people weave a devastating tale. Life is a zero-sum game. Worthlessness is the default condition. It happens because, in our society, there are standards, hierarchies and a shallow structure of persona. There will always be people better than you – that is a cliche of nihilism. But taking yourself into irrelevance is not a profound critique of Being. It is a cheap trick of a rational mind. You have to understand that failure is the price we pay for those standards, and, because mediocrity has consequences both real and harsh, standards are necessary.

What but wilful blindness could possibly shelter people from such withering criticism?

A more dismal, wretched, pessimistic philosophy explains that things are so terrible at the bottom that only delusion can save you. It is for such a reason that a whole generation of social psychologists recommended ‘positive illusion’ as the only reliable route to mental health. Because Mental health is not a question that the answer is written. Mental health is you fighting against you with all of you. Mental health is understanding and believing in good things about you even it does not sound familiar. Mental health needs will-power to improve everything that bothers you, physically, physiologically and mentally.

If your cards are always stacked against you, perhaps the game you are playing is somehow rigged. If the internal voice makes you doubt the value of your endeavour or your life. Perhaps you should stop listening. Maybe its comments are chatter, not wisdom. Everything you do in your life, every game you play does not end at success and failure. If there was not better or worse, nothing would be worth doing. Why make an effort if it does not improve anything. Mental health is not a game, is not a mathematics or a scientific question. It’s a state of being. Maybe the game you are playing does not fit you. There are games that match your talent, your unique mix of strengths, weakness, and situation, involve you productively with other people and sustain and even improve yourself across time. The world allows for many ways of being if you don’t succeed at one, you can try another. Furthermore, if changing games does not work, you can invent a new one.

But why does it happen? When we are very young we are neither individual informed. We have not had the time nor gained the wisdom to develop our own standards. In consequence, we must compare ourselves to others, because the standards are necessary. Without them, there is nowhere to go and nothing to do. As we mature we become, by contrast, increasingly individual and unique. The conditions of our lives become more and more personal and less and less comparable with those of others. Be cautious when you are comparing yourself to others. You are a singular being, once you are an adult. You have your own particular, specific problems – financial, intimate, psychological, and otherwise. Those are embedded in the unique broader context of your existence. Your career or job works for you in a personal manner, or it does not, and it does so in a unique interplay with the other specifics of your life. You must decide how much of your time to spend on this, and how much on that. You must decide what to let go, and want to pursue. You have nature. You can play the tyrant to it, but you will certainly a rebel. How to keep the fight up until you win? Pay attention. Focus on your surroundings, physical and physiological. Notice something that bothers you, that concerns you, that will not let you be, which you could fix, that you would fix. There are problems at the bottom of your eyes. Maybe there is a stack of paper on your desk, and you have been avoiding it. There are terrible things lurking there: tax forms, bill and letters. Notice your fear and have some sympathy for it. Maybe there are snakes in that pile of papers. Maybe you’ll get bitten. How could you possibly cope with something like that? Ask yourself, is there anything at all that I might be willing to do about that pile of paper? Determine yourself. Dare yourself to look at it for few seconds only. You might soon find that the entire file shrinks insignificance, merely because you have looked at part of it and you will find that the whole thing is made of parts. That’s how you should look at your deeply rooted problems. Ask yourself for a voluntary contribution. If you ask nicely and listen carefully, and don’t try any treachery, you would always find a way-out. Now you will be asking yourself, habitually, what could I do that, I would do, to make life a little better. You are not dictating yourself what better must be. Set your sight on the betterment of being. Align yourself, in your soul, with truth and the highest good. There is a habitable order to establish and beauty to bring into existence. There is evil to overcome, suffering to ameliorate, and yourself to better. You have to articulate your own standards of value. Determine the nature of your moral obligation, to yourself. You are nested within a network of social obligations. But this does not mean you must take the rule of lap – dog, obedient and harmless. This’s how a dictator wants his slaves. Whenever you face your fear. Close your eyes and let it tell you what it wants. Don’t let fear stop you. You don’t have to act it out, just because you’re thinking it. If it wants you to drag like a rat. Face it. God only knows what battles must be fought, forthrightly, voluntarily, on the road to peace. If still, something stops you. Try this way. Ask, “Who are you?”. Before purchasing a new house as you hire an inspector to tell the good and bad about the house, similarly, there is an internal critique inside you. You must understand this critique. This will tell you about your hidden flaws and inadequacies. you must walk through your psychological house with it and listen judiciously to what it says. Because you need to know. Because you can’t fix something if you don’t know it is broken and you are broken. Once you have found something then how can you start your renovations without being demoralized, even crossed, by your internal critiques lengthy and painful report your inadequacies? The internal critic will suggest something to set an order, which you could set in order, which you would set in order – voluntarily, without resentment, even with pleasure. Ask yourself: is there one thing that exists in disarray in your life or your situation that you could, and would, set straight? What but of chaos might I eradicate at home, on my desk, in my kitchen, tonight, so the stage could set for a better play? Aim small. You don’t want to shoulder too much, to begin with, given your talents, tendency to deceive, but enough resentment, and the ability to shrink responsibility. Do. What could I do, that I would do, that would accomplish that, and what small thing would I like as a reward. Decide to do even if badly. reward yourself. Do the same thing tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. And, with each day, your baseline of comparison gets a little higher, and that is magic. That’s compound interest. Do that for three years, Now you are wishing on a star. Now the beam is disappearing from your eye, and you are learning to see. And what you aim at determines what you see. That is worth repeating what you aim at determines what you see. Dare, instead, to be dangerous. Dear to be truthful. Dare to articulate yourself and express what would really justify your life. If you allowed your dark and unspoken desires to your partner, for example, to manifest themselves if you are even willing to consider them – you might discover that they were not so dark, given the light of day. You might discover, state that you are just afraid and, so, pretending to be a model. You might find that getting what you actually desire should I stop you from being tempted and strain. Are you so true that your partner would be unhappy if more of you rose to the surface? Consult your resentment. It is a revelatory emotion, for all its pathology. It is part of an evil triad: arrogance, deceit, and resentment. Nothing causes more harm than this underworld Trinity.

When you have something to say silence is a lie – and tyranny feeds on lies. When you start nursing secret fantasies of revenge; when your life is being poisoned and your imagination fills with the wish to devour and destroy. It’s time to push back against oppression, despite the danger. You may not feel the change. Because you are blind. Because Vision is expensive- psychophysiologically expensive; neurologically expensive. Very little of your retina is the high-resolution fovea. We point to high-resolution capacities at the few specific things we are aiming at. And we let everything else-which is almost everything-fade, unnoticed, into the background. There is much more of the world that there is for you. Seeing is very difficult, so you must choose what to see, and let the rest go. The future is like the past. But there is a crucial difference. The past is fixed, but the future – it could be better. It could be better, some precise amount – the amount that can be achieved, perhaps in a day, with some minimal engagements. The present is an eternal flood. But where you start might not be important as the direction you are heading.

Perhaps happiness is always to be found in the journey to uphill, not in the fleeting sense of satisfaction awaiting at the next peak. We must become conscious of our desires, and articulate them, and prioritize them, and arrange them into hierarchies.

The realisation is dawning. To journey happily may well be better than arrive successfully. Ask, and you shall receive. Knock, open. If you ask, as if you want, and knock as if you want to enter, you may be offered the chance to improve your life, a little: a lot, completely – and with that improvement, some progress will be made in being itself.

Compare yourself to who you are yesterday, not to who someone else’s today.