Comparison, Appreciation, Gratitude, Humility

I was having a chat with a coworker and the topic of salaries, lifestyle and people in industry came up. Frequently these talking points often leads to a sigh of dissatisfaction of our current situation, come the bitching and moaning comparing ourselves to people in our similar circumstances who make slightly X more or have Y, have Z, doing W.

I sometimes fall into this train of thought as well. However in the middle of this the two of us did catch and identify this wrong train of thought.

The conversation sort of went like this.

Coworker: Have you seen the price of AMZN lately? Kicking myself in the ass for not buying in when it was at $1k. Now it’s too expensive now.
MrCPP: Ouch I can’t even say if it’s worth it to buy in now. How can we tell that it’s going to continue doing well?
Coworker: Right? Dam, wish I was working there. Did you know that an employee at Amazon get’s 20 shares as part of their offer? So by now it would be 20 * $3k once they vest over their two years. That’s basically a given $60k on top of their huge salary! Fuck
MrCPP: Dam, what I would do with those 20 shares/$60k. Here we are with our measly salaries…. Oh but we work in X, even as average tech workers we earn Y over the median income of a family in Canada… as a single person. Put that into perspective.
Coworker: Hmm, good point I am living pretty well like this.
MrCPP: Yeah, personally I think we’re doing pretty good. Even better in Corona times. If anything… I don’t even know what real/true suffering is like.

The comparison problem

Thing is it is okay to gripe about our problems. To each individual, it always seems like our “Pain and Suffering” is our maximum, but we must not forget that being in the West we are afforded with so many freedoms and rights that we often overlook. Comes the lesson of of putting it all into perspective and having gratitude and appreciation for what we have.

So we are comparing ourselves to others, but we often compare against people are are better than us. On top of that we compare ourselves against them on an arbitrary metric that we perceive as greater. Whereas this lens of comparison is unfair when we discount all other variables, metrics, aspects of a person’s life to ours. We could even look at people ‘below’ for the perspective, humility and dispelling of ego in order to appreciate what we current only have, who we currently are.

As an exercise we could consider each individuals unique situation. Breaking it all down I’ll come to the conclusion that we can’t ever compare ourselves to anyone else?

If we are still unsatisfied with ourselves then we can only do what can day by day to improve your own situation. Simply, to work towards your ideal, that is on you. Now quit bitching. : ^)

We do have one person we can fairly compare with: Ourself. Ourself from yesterday.

To quote Jordan Peterson from 12 Rules for Life:

Rule #4: “Compare yourself with who you were yesterday, not with who someone else is today”

Meditations 7.67

Nature did not blend things so inextricable that you can’t draw your own boundaries - place your own well-being in your own hands. It’s quite possible to be a good man without anyone realizing it. Remember that.
And this too: you don’t need much to live happily. And just because you’ve abandon your hopes of becoming a great thinker or scientist, don’t give up on attaining freedom, achieving humility, serving others, obeying God.