The Lens of Comparison

The lens of comparison turns the windows of neighbors into doors through which happiness exits our lives. When we look through the lens of comparison, we will find our unhappiness sitting beside and drooling over the happiness of our neighbors. Social beings are like voyeurs that get emotionally stimulated by looking at the lifestyles of others.

Some people try to find happiness by mining in the lives of others to extract happiness from their lifestyles. While others allow the laughter of their neighbor to awake their unhappiness. But not every laugh is the bellowing of joy; sometimes the laughter that we envy in the lives of others is their way of distracting us from their hidden pain.

Comparison is a social art that teaches us how to be unhappy. An art in which we study the superficial features of others’ happiness yet have never held up the mirror of life to examine the features of our own happiness. So when happiness knocks at the door of our lives, we fail to recognize it because it doesn’t look like the pseudo-happiness that society advertised.

Society treats happiness has an emotional fashion that’s tailor-made to fit all emotional bodies, but our emotional bodies are as diverse as our physical bodies, just as one size of clothing cannot fit all body types, one kind of happiness cannot please all emotional bodies. Yet many of us want to emotionally wear the happiness of celebrities but none of us wants to try on their uncelebrated pain.

Comparison imprisons us to the lives of others, causing us to feel out of place in our own lives. In the social prison of comparison, people are not free to be happy. They need the happiness of others to give them permission to be happy.

Comparison reduces happiness to a social emotion, so people have to measure up with others before they can be happy. But once happiness becomes a social emotion we lose control over it. Happiness will look like happiness but it won’t feel like happiness if we allow opinions to become its mirror.

The happiness of people is a well that flows to the surface of their lives, but their pain is an underground river that flows in silence. So when mining in the lives of others to find happiness, be careful not to dig too deep.