On Comparing Ourselves To Others
Posted on May 18, 2019 by lynnefisher
I can’t believe I haven’t done a post on this topic, but after getting the idea and then checking, the answer is no, I have not. So it’s about time! I would argue that comparing ourselves to others is innate and that we do it all the time, whether just fleetingly and harmlessly, perhaps to make ourselves realise we are in fact good at what we do, or that we are so very fortunate in our lifestyle and relationships, or more destructively, where our peace of mind is blown apart and we are rendered upset and deflated by comparing ourselves negatively with respect to those exact same category of life conditions, where we are looking much worse off in relation to the ‘other’. But what’s going on? Why do we do it? And with social media peppered with opportunities for comparing our lives to others, opportunities which are based on what is going well for others in their lives, which are often presented like candy in a sweet shop with memes to match, how are we supposed to handle the comparison game? Now, I do feel I’ve grown as a person in many respects, but I have to acknowledge comparison creeps into my creative life and I don’t like it at all. So taking into account my personal belief that comparison has got to be some petty, unsavoury aspect that is in our very psyche, I’ve just been searching for a concrete psychological reason as to why we do it, and I’ve found a man called Festinger, who wrote about it in 1954, where ‘social comparison theory’ was born.