Comparing Yourself To Other People on Social Media is Dumb

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Tried to think of another title.  I did. That said, as I continue writing about Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life and getting through chapter 4 titled Compare Yourself to Who You Were Yesterday, Not to Who Someone Else is Today, I really couldn’t find anything else to call this blurb.  

It seems as though that in today’s modern world of social media that there is always someone out there that has their stuff entirely together, most definitely more than your sad self.  There’s your friend from high school that models in New York and travels abroad regularly. There’s your other friend that started their own business and now has a vacation home in Vancouver and spends the summers sailing the Carribean from their boat.  

Then there’s you. You wake up every morning. Maybe you have a couple of kids that you get ready every morning and sit in the drop off line at daycare for 30 minutes before dropping them off. Perhaps you’re not at that point yet, and you’re just living in some 400 sqft. Appt in Oakland and can’t afford to do anything on the weekend because, well you just can’t…

Your career seems boring.  You wish you had friends that were professional models that get paid to advertise designer water.  You wish you could get your stuff together and drop those 20 lbs like your friend that dropped 50lbs and wakes up and tells you that you can do it too every day on Instagram.

“I need to get my $hit together”

Chapter 4 of this fantastic book is about not getting caught up in comparing yourself to other people. We all do it though, as Peterson says in the book,”Who cares if you’re the Prime Minister of Canada if someone else is the President of the United States?” It’s so unfortunately true in today’s world. I do it too; it happens probably at least once a week where I see someone from my past professional life on Linkedin that is a CEO or owns their own business and say to myself, “man, I need to get my $hit together.”

Peterson explains that thousands of years ago, believe it or not, we all lived in communities of usually dozens or possibly hundreds of people where we all knew each other.  Everyone had a purpose. You were part of a tribe where every person filled a specific purpose that was crucial to the survival of that community.

In these communities of our ancestors, the cold reality was that people that didn’t serve a purpose in the community didn’t continue to exist in the community.  Those folks usually didn’t survive (that felt crummy to write), but the majority of the people in the community all had a role that they filled and they almost always filled that role well.  Doing a job well makes people feel a sense of belonging, especially when that role is essential to the survival of the people in your community. Dare I say, this feeling might make an individual’s serotonin levels increase (desperate backlink to my last blog entry).

In a world where we tend to want to give every child a trophy for showing up, it really shouldn’t be a surprise that we grow up and have a tough time. We grow up to see nothing, but other people take pictures of their trophies and post them on Facebook, and we have to scroll by that when we are sitting in the drive-through of Chik-fil-a at 8 pm on a Tuesday after working all day.

Focus on you

If you don’t know by now, Jordan Peterson drives home the point of focusing on you. Don’t worry about trying to tell someone else what they should do with their politics or religion, worry about yourself first before you feel like you have any idea how to fix someone else.  The same is true of this crazy self-loathing because of what other people advertise themselves as on social media.

Peterson explains that almost always, when you do this, you have grabbed some arbitrary dimension of someone else ’s life like money, or traveling, or appearance, and then taken that dimension and thoroughly beat yourself up for not being in the same place. Newsflash, our lives are multidimensional.

It’s entirely possible that the person that you are beating yourself up about how successful they are or how much they travel to Italy is doing the same self-loathing exercise while watching your Instagram wishing they could find someone to settle down with so they could go to Chick-fil-a on a Tuesday.

Peterson explains that our lives are each unique in our own way.  We all have our own strengths and weaknesses that are often entirely outwardly invisible.  In fact, I’d be willing to bet next month’s mortgage that you are way undervaluing your own life and completely overvaluing the person that you keep comparing yourself to.

Envy is a crummy place to hang out, why go there?

Peterson explains in Chapter 4 that the reality is that none of our lives are binary in either we’re successful, or we’re a failure.  Life is a journey of gradual successes that will provide you with an experience that you can hopefully enjoy along the way. What matters is getting better along the way. None of us are ever going to get to a point where people are coming up to you in mass telling you how successful you are, and even if you did get to that point, you probably would still beat yourself up over what you are lacking.  At least, you will if you haven’t figured out how to focus on your own $hit.

Chapter 4 is about putting these feelings of envy in check in a world where you’re surrounded by the best versions of everyone you know.  It’s about not being concerned with what other people are doing because you’re so busy working on you.

I’ll finish with one of my favorite quotes from the book as I feel it completely encapsulates what chapter 4 is all about in one strong statement. “There is habitable order to establish and beauty to bring into existence. There is evil to overcome, suffering to improve, and yourself to better.”