Wired to compare
Why do we always compare ourselves with those better off than us even though that makes us feel miserable about ourselves? Why don’t we compare ourselves with those worse off and feel better instead?
We suffer from something called reference group bias.
Say you’ve been a Manager for a long time. You’ve wanted a promotion for at least the last three performance appraisals. And finally the day arrives. You’ve been promoted to a Senior Manager. You feel chuffed!
But then a week passes and–bang! — you start matching yourself up with other Senior Managers, maybe the best one. How much does she make? How big is the team she manages? Gotta have what she has.
You don’t just compare yourself with one person for everything. You pick the best in everything that you see–a house like your high-flying cousin’s, a car like your neighbor’s, and the best returns in the stock market among friends.
Not just in your peer group, thanks to social media, wherever you look you have people with happier families, shinier cars, and whiter teeth. The world insists on reminding you how far you are from your desired state. Aargh!
So you have a knack for inflicting cruelty on yourself–that much is clear. But why?
This is what Yale psychology professor and happiness researcher Laurie Santos has to say:
“We are products of natural selection, which is a blind process that, if you intentionalize it, it’s going for anything that will get you to survive and reproduce into the next generation. So natural selection is like, ‘double down on all the resources, all the accolades, all the status, all that stuff just in case’. Because we really want to make sure our genes get out there and it doesn’t care about you being happy. It really wants you to be craving, striving, always pushing for more genes in the next-generation individual. So I think we’re built with a mind that’s not necessarily geared towards making us happy.”
What can we do about it?
Perhaps, instead of tracking the output of those successful (money, fame, following), we could track the input (hard work, commitment, discipline). Accept that there’s someone better and use that as motivation to become better.
Instead of chasing shifting goalposts, we could focus on getting 1% better every day. Build a long chain of small gains.
And practise negative visualization. Think of what if we lost what is ours to make us cherish what we have.
Although that didn’t work with me growing up, when my mother used to ask me to imagine the plight of those less fortunate to make me finish what was served to me. I could only think of all my friends who were having biriyani while I was staring at a plate of greens. I was worried something was broken inside me. Thankfully, as we now know, there was nothing wrong with me. We’re just wired to compare.
