Comparison: Recipes for Disaster

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A Basic Recipe for Jealous Comparison

Time: Instant

Ingredients:

  • 1 object of comparison
  • 1 jealous thought
  • 1 drain on your self-confidence
  • A pinch of myopic vision

Instructions:

Stir ingredients together until you’ve worked yourself up into a frenzy. Think about how envious you are of someone else’s success, how you deserve it more than they do, or how it will never happen for you. By all means, do not actually do anything productive (this might make you feel good again).

Serves: none.

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A Recipe for Siblings

  • Time: A Lifetime
  • Serves: two or more of blood relation

Ingredients:

  • 1 or more siblings
  • Multiple adults
  • A set of skills or interests
  • 1 package of boundaries

Instructions:

  1. Grow up with one or more siblings.
  2. Listen to adults, certainly including but not limited to your own parents, compare you. You are good at math; your sister is a good writer. She is athletic, you are artistic.
  3. Learn to accentuate your differences; take art classes, major in biology. Don’t write until you turn 30 or so.
  4. Optional step: Become an adult, learn to try new things and learn to understand yourself, not in relation to your sibling. Allow this to free you from some of the comparison and expectations. Ignore your mom/aunt/cousin who says, “I had no idea you liked to do that! You know who’s really good at that? Your sister.”
Recipe Source: My sister and I are three years apart and very close. Being compared to her was partially inspirational– I yearned to live up to her example. Comparisons between us were not competitive or unpleasant, but, in retrospect, I believe they inhibited my own sense of what I was interested in and what I could do. It also didn’t allow her to change and grow.

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 A Internet Recipe for Unhappiness

Time: this recipe can eat up hours

Ingredients:

  • 1 computer, with which to browse the internet
  • At least one name of someone to Google whose work you admire
  • 1 seed of self-doubt

Instructions:

  1. Open computer and Google the name of someone you admire.
  2. Browse their site, wonder why they are more successful.
  3. Allow the comparison to simmer, the surface will crust and look ugly as you judge yourself.
  4. Despair that you will never achieve a fraction of what they have.
  5. Repeat.
Recipe source:  My friend who’s a photographer sometimes gets into a sad slump looking at other photographers’ work. “Comparing and despairing,” he calls it. This is his recipe (though as he’s gained confidence in his own work, he uses it less and less).

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A Recipe for Repair

Recipe source: Sam Harris, in his book “Waking Up” describes a time that he and a friend took the psychoactive drug MDMA. He is filled with a loving euphoria and realizes that he loves his friend deeply. In this state, it is clear he truly wants his friend to be happy, so that when his friend is successful, it makes Sam happy too. It look him this drug-fueled experience to overcome any jealousy or competition he felt for his friend and tap into this vital connection.
  • Time: a moment or a lifetime
  • Serves: everyone

Ingredients:

  • Love and generosity
  • Willingness to open up
  • MDMA (optional)

Instructions:

  1. When you start to feel the tendrils of jealousy wrap their thin, wiry arms around you, instead of following the previous recipes, try to love your object of comparison, deeply.
  2. Think about how much you love and care for this person. Try to be happy for them.
  3. Try to love yourself. Remember that their success does not really mean that you’ve failed.
  4. Repeat as often as needed.

 

Note: This doesn’t always work.

 

Image: “Kitchen Still Life” by William Scott (1948)

5 Comments

  1. Tim M.

    So true! For the basic recipe instructions I’d add wondering who “gave” the object of comparison his/her chance to be successful. There just had to be someone else involved.

  2. steph

    Thanks Tim! Great addition. Sometimes it’s true that there is someone else involved, and sometimes it’s just our way of cutting the object of our jealousy down to size!

  3. Meredith Watts

    Sometimes it’s hard to remember that it’s not a zero-sum world. Success does not get used up. And it’s different for each person. I often notice when I read a profile of a successful person that she or he never seems to have started out saying ‘I plan to be successful.’ They’ve just taken opportunities where they found them, and tried to do the next right thing, and it added up. That thought helps me a lot. Meredith W.

  4. Jennifer Brodsky

    Love this post. Great piece! Feels especially relevant after spending this past weekend with my uber successful sister in law. Thanks Steph!

  5. steph

    Thank you Meredith and Jenny! Mer– yes, it is SO hard to remember that success isn’t a finite quantity! That’s very helpful.

Comments are closed.