“I envy people who have achieved more in life than me. It worries me if someone occupies a higher position, studies better, earns more, someone has a better personal life … ”Sometimes you hear this from people who are quite successful, and their experiences are always based on comparison. Comparing themselves with friends and relatives, they involuntarily experience irritation … which is often followed by despondency, disappointment in their own abilities.
High grades, high salary, career growth, high position — the vertical model of assessing oneself and others is already set at the language level. One gets the impression that in the world there is a certain Ladder of Success common to all, climbing which is the inevitable lot of everyone. Looking up and seeing someone we know on the next step, we experience anxiety: since someone overtook us, it means that our chances of winning are reduced.
«WHAT DO MY PARENTS EXPECT FROM ME, WHAT SOCIETY REQUIRES, AND WHAT DO I WANT?»
Living in a vertical world is not easy. The people who inhabit it are always competitors. It is impossible to be friends and trust in it, it is difficult to rejoice in other people’s successes, it is difficult to appreciate one’s own achievements, because there will always be someone who has achieved more. But what awaits us there, at the end of the stairs? What reward awaits the «winner of the competition»? Most likely, not exactly the one we were counting on when starting the ascent, because this virtual vertical, unlike our forces, has no end.
As a rule, the habit of comparing yourself to others begins in childhood and develops throughout life. The model of success that the parental family has provided a person with, over time, is supplemented by ideas about success that exist in society. All these rigid imperatives put pressure on us, limiting our choices, preventing our own desires and preferences from manifesting. Here are some questions that we can ask ourselves in order to go beyond this scheme: what do my parents expect (or expected) from me, what does society require, what do I want, and, finally, how compatible are the first, second and third? Of course, the solution of this problem is not a matter of one day. But by solving it, we learn to grow in relation to ourselves, and not others, and as a result, we get the opportunity to leave the vertical world. In this way, we learn to choose for ourselves with whom to compete and with whom to cooperate, and find our own life, in which there is no place for envy and disturbing comparisons.