Comparing ourselves with others can cause problems

Matt Pearl

A few decades ago, folks couldn’t get enough of a poem, set on an occasion or two to music, called Desiderata.

If you have read it or remember it, then I’m sure that you would agree that its verses contain solid, everyday wisdom for the peace-loving, self-actualized person. So naturally, I hang on its every word while reading it, then forget most of its message when it comes time to apply the truths it teaches.

It’s my nature. I know how to help myself, but it’s so easy to allow oneself to become angry, loud, opinionated and self-righteous. And when you and I do choose to adopt such obnoxious traits into our own personalities, we make a bad choice.

One line of the poem, written in the early 1950s by Max Ehrmann, has been on my mind lately:

If you compare yourself with others,

You may become vain and bitter;

For always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.

It is one of the more difficult challenges we face: to labor to the best of our personal abilities and demands in this world, all while ignoring the relative successes and failures of others.

For next door is your neighbor who can’t get his act together, the person who makes you feel a little better about your own failures.

And then there’s the perfect home on the other side, whose owners have accumulated greater wealth than you, work less, vacation more and are always smiling with their flawless life.

The product of the one could easily be vanity: I don’t have it all figured out, but I’m closer to having my life together than those folks next door. The other bitterness: Why am I working so hard when folks like the neighbors are buying cars and going to Cancun every couple of months?

We compare ourselves constantly against some social or economic standard, generally an arbitrary measurement contrived by people who have never met you, have never seen your town and are making assumptions based upon national––or world–– averages.

There is but one standard that deserves our attention, and that is the code by which we feel obligated morally to live. If you know something is right, you should do it. If you know something is wrong, you should not do it. There really is little more than that.

Our lives and the time we are allotted here are precious gifts; it is the ultimate form of nonsense that I can imagine for us to waste each by deciding how we ‘stack up’ in terms of our human value against our neighbors.

As far as I can discern, I cannot find any value in determining that I am more or less of a person than my friends and neighbors based upon my possessions. To the contrary, I have often found that the more value we place upon our possessions––whether we have many and love them, or we are poor and want them––the less happiness we find.

I’m not trying to brag, but I do a job that I love every working day. Nobody’s getting rich around here, but I have what I need. What more, precisely, should a person expect from life?

But it could be vain for me to assume that I have life figured out, and it would cause bitterness in my mind to assume that I deserve a certain amount of money because of how valuable I think I am.

Despite what most of this world is telling you, chasing your dreams of money, security and possessions to keep even with the neighbors is a pitiable waste of a life.

Matt Pearl owns and operates newspapers in King City, Albany, and Grant City.