Do you keep comparing yourself with others?
Is comparison with others good or bad? It can be either, depending on your attitude, writes Dr Shrirang Bakhle.
“Bhalaa uski kameez meri kameez se safed kaise?” goes the ad of a clothes detergent! Comparison with others is so integral and important part of our lives that we keep doing all the time. We learn about comparison right from the first day of nursery school: “See, that Neha is not crying. Then why are you crying?” And then the comparison continues throughout the life – right up to the choice of tombstones!
We keep comparing ourselves with ‘others’. As a person, we keep comparing with whom we consider as our peers – our classmates, neighbours, office colleagues, cousins. Our comparisons continue – comparing our family with other families, our community with other communities, our company with other companies and even our nation with other nations!
The ad agencies are aware of the tremendous importance of comparison (and jealousy) in our mind. So many of the ads are nothing but a demo of comparison – whether it is a deo or a house.
Is comparison with others good or bad? It can be either – depending on your attitude. For example, a competition is a place for direct comparison. Is it good or bad? It depends on how you look at it: whether you want to win – or defeat others! A healthy competition is good. It encourages every participant to perform better and better. If there is no competition, people would probably put in much less efforts. Consider all the athletes. If they had to run just for personal pleasure, they would not put in so much effort as when they need to compete and win.
So the comparison in a competition is good if it motivates everyone to practise more and excel. But the main flipside of a competition is the stress it can produce – if you have the wrong attitude. There is this joke: a neta was speaking at the prize distribution ceremony of a football tournament. He said, “I feel sad that only one team won the first prize. I want to tell the organizers to ensure that next year more number of teams win the first prize”!
Every person cannot win every time. So what effect does ‘not winning’ have on you? If the sadness motivates you to work harder and become better, then the competition is good for you. If the ‘not winning’ pushes you into depression, then you need to change the attitude.
Perhaps the most beneficial effect of comparison with others is learning from others. But for this benefit, we need to have the learning attitude. If we find someone doing better than us, the immediate reaction should be: what can I learn from this person? Rather than burning in the self-created fire of envy, it useful to spend time observing what different skills or materials the person has.
Suppose the issue is promotion given to another person. You angrily feel that this person does not have any special skills but only by playing office politics, s/he has got the promotion. So what can you learn from this person? Of course, the skill of playing politics, the skill to convince the bosses to give promotion!
Healthy competition that motivates us to excel is good. Comparison with a view of learning from others is useful. But comparison with others and feeling sad about being behind is a fairly silly idea. There are many reasons for this statement.
Every person’s personality and life has hundreds of facets: money, health, looks, family life, responsibilities, sacrifices, assets etc. Hence every person’s life is completely different. Even the lives of siblings in a family are completely different. Hence taking a scale and comparing yourself with another person about one particular facet is illogical.
Secondly, for every such scale there will be people ahead of you and there will be people behind you. If you compare yourself with people ahead of you, you will become sad. Whereas, if you compare yourself with people behind you will feel better. So in the end what will you feel? Trying to make progress and improve one’s life is a good idea. But trying to beat somebody in a life’s race is fairly silly idea.
There are some happy people who are content with their life. But they feel happy to help others who are less fortunate than them. They feel happy to see everyone progressing. This is the best type of comparison with others.
Thus, comparison with others is integral – almost unavoidable. If that comparison motivates you to try and excel, it is good. If you compare notes with a view of learning, it is useful. If you compare with a view of helping the less fortunate, it is nice. But if you compare yourself with people ahead of you (about a particular facet) and feel sad about it, it is fairly silly.