If my own life experience is any kind of indication, we live in a constant state of mental comparison to others. As in, how do I measure up in the estimation of my parents or children, or perhaps by the standards of my culture or race or socioeconomic grouping? Who am I, relative to them?
It’s a brutal weight to bear, and across the hours of any given day, we’re rarely aware of its influence.
Except in those times when we are. When, for example, we’re struggling to make the next mortgage payment at the same time our neighbor is celebrating a new car, kitchen renovation, or exotic vacation. Or when our child is struggling with a drug dependency at the same time our sibling’s child is matriculating into an Ivy League school.
A digitally interconnected world, complete with its insatiable appetite for imagery over words, has only exacerbated this mindset, helping to explain why, young or old, epic numbers of us are feeling anxious, depressed, empty. “See how happy they are compared to me? My life pales by comparison.”
Even those with the fame, fortune, and good looks toward which the rest of us ostensibly aspire, are miserable – the recent suicides of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain only the latest examples in a litany of rich and famous suffering.
This comparative mindset likely also helps to explain why we spend so much of our time gossiping about and nosing into the affairs of others, why we insist that the rest of the world fit our ideas of what is and isn’t appropriate. We may be miserable, dammit, but that’s not going to stop us from insisting that others follow suit.
From an early age I was an unhappy child, the product of a chronically depressed mother and a sociopathic, narcissistic father. As the unfortunate namesake of the latter destined to live alone with him, I was also told, in ways large and small, through both word and deed, that I generally didn’t matter, and in those rare times when I did, that I was failing miserably in that department as well.
Not surprisingly, I came of age deeply, profoundly insecure, and that programming has never left me, even now when I’m able to shine the light of awareness on it.
Which explains why schadenfreude, the pleasure derived from the misfortune of others, long occupied part of my mental real estate (and still makes the occasional appearance). Particularly if the one struggling was also an object of my envy – which is to say, most people.
I’m not alone in this, of course. We humans have a long and less than illustrious history of putting people on pedestals and then tearing them down (or nailing them to crosses). We fall all over ourselves when some celebrity briefly shares our air supply, only to quietly celebrate when word leaks of their latest stint in rehab.
We are all the judges and the judged, victims of the casual malice and fantasy of others, and ready sources of fantasy and malice in our turn. And if we are sometimes accused of sins of which we are innocent, are there not also other sins of which we are guilty and of which the world knows nothing?
– Iris Murdoch, ‘Nuns and Soldiers’
The comparative mindset is logical for the simple fact we exist only in relation to others. An actual Tarzan, isolated since infancy, would never have fully understood or fit into the human world since the entirety of his early programming was as an ape. He could learn to adapt – to use the proper fork, speak, drive on the right side of the road – but at his core, he would always remain an ape just as, when the 3 am bathroom break invariably calls, the anxiousness of my childhood is there waiting in the dark to accompany me to the toilet.
So what’s the way out?
Many moons ago, I wrote a post about what it really means to walk in the shoes of another. I did not realize it at the time, but it would prove to be one of my more profound posts, mostly because the words came without any interference or authorship from me.
The realization was that to truly walk in the shoes of another was to wear their skin, to be raised in their unique circumstances, and to experience all the programming that came with it. Carried to its logical conclusion, this means, of course, that this is not a proposition of a ME behaving or thinking as that individual, but rather ME becoming HIM/HER.
The profundity is, I hope, as obvious to you as it is me.
Perhaps you hate Donald Trump (or Barack Obama). Well friend, if you truly walk in the shoes of either man, what would you do different? HOW would you do anything different? Would you not become Donald Trump or Barack Obama? Aren’t these men fully destined to be precisely who they are just as you are destined to be you?
How, then, do we not experience compassion for ALL living things – for Trump or Obama, yes, but also the platypus and the oak tree, the annoying neighbor and the person reading these words. Tarzan doesn’t want to eat with his hands AND feet anymore than I want anxiety waiting for me at 3 am. It just is because it was programmed that way.
All of which is why, I believe, the mystics and masters urged us not to focus on or to celebrate them, nor to worship false idols (hint: ALL idols are false), or to worry about saving the world.
Instead, we are advised to save ourselves, to dive deep into the one who is marching to this programming, the one who was programmed in the first place. Who or what is that?
