#3: Comparison as Symptom

comparison & envy are on my mind a lot lately...

There are countless videos and essays about "how to stop comparing yourself to others". Something has always bothered me about this advice. It suggests comparison is a completely voluntary process, as though we just choose to torture ourselves with wishing we could be as beautiful or talented or successful as the people around us (including our friends). The idea that “comparison is the thief of joy” hides something far more sinister: that comparison is not an active choice but an inevitable consequence of a culture rooted in individualism, inequality, supremacy, and hierarchy.

I am skeptical of framing such a torturous and isolating feeling as something we could just opt out of. Similar to many popular self-help refrains (the mountain is you! you create your own reality!) it burdens the individual with responsibility for collective/social ills that no single person can simply overcome by choice. And it isolates us even further in our shame, making us think the problem is us rather than the value system, technologies, and systems that shape us (“Technology, for better or worse, affects every aspect of our lives. Our very sense of who we are is shaped and reshaped by the tools we have at our disposal.”)

I am on a lifelong journey to radically accept my emotions and treat them with curiosity rather than judgment. I have come to view emotions not as individual experiences to be managed but as collective symptoms to be understood. Symptoms of:

• What it might means to be alive at this time (since our emotions are in a sense an expression of our aliveness)

• What our cultures value and do not value (we don't compare ourselves based on how loving or in service we are to our communities)

• How social structures either support or go against our inherent nature (comparison feels terrible because it is underpinned by a set of social relationships, values, and systems that promote human suffering rather than wellbeing)

I love this Gabor Mate quote from The Myth of Normal:

“If we could begin to see much illness itself not as a cruel twist of fate or some nefarious mystery but rather as an expected and therefore normal consequence of abnormal, unnatural circumstances, it would have revolutionary implications for how we approach everything health related.” ― Gabor Maté

Comparison, then, is an expected and normal consequence of abnormal, unnatural circumstances. Such as:

• We are collectivist species either living in or greatly influenced by individualist cultures, values, and aspirations (e.g., the idea that the purpose of your life is to become your best self (intentionally designed to be an elusive project) rather than contribute to your community)

• We survived by collaborating, sharing resources, and looking after one another rather than being made to compete for resources in a matrix of manufactured scarcity

• We have abnormal, unattainable beauty standards rooted in Eurocentricism and elitism — and we equate a person’s proximity to this standard with their value and worth as a human being. We are not allowed to present as the animals we are, and our ability to access love, respect, dignity, and material resources is tied to our level of Beauty capital

• We are unquantifiable, divine beings made to live a quantified existence where worth can be measured in followers, likes, and dollar signs. Surveillance capitalist technology companies have in many ways taken over our sense of self for their own ends. We are now exposed to millions of people when we were not meant to know more than 100, and the addictiveness of these platforms steals our very life-force (attention) from us. We all participate in a collective performance of self that alienates us from ourselves and from each other (we are envious of a fantasy of a life, not the life itself, but the distinction matters less and less) Can I just say, I love this quote by Byung-Chul Han in The Disappearance of Rituals:

  • "The society of authenticity is a performance society. All members perform themselves. All produce themselves. Everyone pays homage to the cult of the self, the worship of self in which everyone is his or her own priest."

This quote is very enticing to me and invites a whole other discussion that I will resist for the moment (in what way are you (am I) performing yourself? producing yourself? in what way do we only compare ourselves to productions of selves and never the self itself? can we ever even access the “true” self in a world like ours? who would we be in another kind of world? and other questions… again, enticing).

But the overarching point is that: social comparison, and the shame that accompanies it, is a symptom rather than a cause of our suffering.

And what are we told to do in response to comparison?

Philosopher Bayo Akomolafe says: sometimes the way that we respond to crisis is the crisis itself. In the face of comparison, we are told (and I have told myself and others the same) “you are on your own path". There is one way in which this advice is soothing, reminding us to stay focused on our own journeys rather than relegate them to the mere shadows of other people’s. But there is another sense that when we try to comfort ourselves and each other in this way, we are simply responding to individualism with more individualism. Because the fact is, we are not (fully) on our own paths. We are a fundamentally and beautifully and inextricably interconnected, inter-dependent species, and we are touched and moved and affected and (dare i say) influenced by one another. The fact that the only comfort and reprieve we find from our alienation from each other is further alienation is its own kind of crisis, like a room of infinite mirrors, emblematic of our entrapment.

Audre Lorde predicted such a response when she said:

“The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, and which knows only the oppressors’ tactics, the oppressors’ relationships”. —Audre Lorde

I find myself asking…

• How can we re-learn how to relate to each other and to ourselves in a way that rejects “the oppressors’ tactics, the oppressors’ relationships?”?

• If the world whispers pathways of change and possibilities to us at all times, what is it trying to tell us through social comparison?

• How can we respond to the crisis of unworthiness and alienation with something more connective and less further alienating — less of a crisis itself?

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