Week 109: When Comparing Becomes a Burden

Our culture takes comparing things for granted: “This is better than that.” “He is more accomplished than she.” “I have more than you.” Comparisons are such a natural part of our worldview that we engage them without recognizing their impact on our sense of well-being.

In a recent conversation with a colleague, we talked about the unexpected burden that arises when we compare ourselves with others. We discussed how inevitable it often seems to experience our own worth in comparison to someone else – and we explored how disheartening and disempowering it is to do that, even when we may feel, at times, that there’s no other way to think about things, that comparisons are inevitable.

The biggest problem with viewing people and things as “better” or “worse” than each other is that we also tend to compare ourselves as well, feeling “less than” or “more than”, depending on who’s moving through our lives at any given time. This is a recipe for a vulnerable sense of self-esteem, so it’s a worthwhile practice to avoid comparing, and to learn not to compare ourselves to others. In nurturing healthy self-esteem, one of my favorite ideas has to do with working toward our “personal best”, where we develop ourselves in terms of our particular values and beliefs, rather than in response to comparing ourselves to others.

What I invite you to do in this week’s experiment is to begin to look at the cost of comparing yourself to others, to notice what happens when you get caught up in comparisons of whatever kind. In any process of comparing, someone has to be fabulous and someone has to be awful, something has to be more valuable and something less. There’s no way around it – comparisons set up an either/or context that narrows our perspective and experience. When we’re able to view the world with a point of view that supports “both/and”, we tend to experience ourselves and others in terms of the personal best stance I mentioned above, without the judgments that inevitably accompany comparisons.

For example, let’s say you’re at a gathering and there is someone with whom you really enjoy a conversation. It’s stimulating, inspiring, and you walk away from it filled up with new energy and ideas. Then, you move into a conversation with someone whose sensibilities and ways of being don’t touch you in the same way. If you were to engage this experience from a perspective of comparing, you’d have to make this second person less interesting, less whatever, in order to have the delicious experience of the other person continue to be special. On the other hand, if you were to move out of comparing and into being in the present moment with the experience in front of you, you could notice that you had a very stimulating experience before and now you’re having one that is different from that. You can notice that you don’t enjoy the present experience very much and move to shift away from it as opportunity allows, but you don’t have to go into a great deal of internal judgment about either person in order to register that you like one experience and don’t like the other. You’re shifting into what is, and into responding to the moment in whatever ways feel appropriate to you.

As I read what I’ve written above, I find that this is one of the harder experiments I’ve offered. This is because moving away from judgment doesn’t mean we don’t need to discern what is good for us, what is toxic, what we enjoy, what we don’t, what we’re willing to support and what we’re not. The challenge is to discover that it’s possible to do this without the inherently activated, “tight”, or critical stance involved in judgment. As you explore this experiment, notice what you discover about your relationship with judgment – about yourself as well as others. And, most importantly, see what happens when you do this experiment without bringing judgment to the process!

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