The Comparison Trap
Editor’s Note: Last week, we discussed how all humans seek a balance between periods of stability and growth in both relationships and careers. We see-saw between the comfort of knowing and the uncertainty that can come with our pursuit of passion. Both hold space in their respective containers, but there is danger when we fail to acknowledge society’s influence and how it might morph what we dub as passion.
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We become too easily distracted from our passions in the modern day.
We turn them into goals, plot them against a timeline, and start our journey. Sounds reasonable, right?
The journey originates as a search for more. A period of growth over stability. A search for passion. Here I’m defining passion as the force of curiosity that keeps moving us into the unknown. Passion is eroticism. However, somehow somewhere, passion is eaten up by the shadow of peripheral outcomes. Our mind’s logic trumping the heart’s intuition.
On our journey we notice narrow side paths where others have trodden, fascinated by the eroticism and vitality of another person’s life. We compare and compete with others for money, fame, and status, rarely — if ever — stopping to examine how far we’ve trekked from our original path. The path that was once defined by our passion.
Finally, when we get to where we’re going, we question what set us on this path in the first place, unable to find an answer. We are left asking “can we want what we have?”
If our desire for “more” is coming from a place of personal growth and pursuit of passion — desires and goals based on our own values — we have nothing to worry about. We will be able to find novelty in the fabric of our existing life. This is what allows us to ultimately “want what we have” in our relationships and in our careers.
This is the goal. To desire the very life you are living.
However, more often than not, passion takes a backseat over time while societal pressures hop in to steer our desire for more. How might we become distracted from our passions if we fall prey to external influences?
The predators of passion can be classified into three buckets:
The Comparison Trap
Higher Information Influx
A Shift In Goal Posts
These themes are applicable to relationships and career alike, and there is a lot to unpack. In today’s discussion, we’ll just explore The Comparison Trap and how it threatens the underlying passion that should serve as our trusty guide through life.
Consumerist Toxicity
Couples therapist Esther Perel’s take on how comparison impacts relationships is illuminating, as she likens the modern mindset around relationships to consumerism, in which price-and-quality comparison is implicit.
“What we have today is an unparalleled freedom,” says Perel in an interview with Financial Times. “And so, we have the ethos of work entering the dating world: where you commodify people and look for a set of attributes.”
She discusses how we have really high standards based on ‘the market’ and how this is toxic, because it fosters a consumerist approach to relationships. We can easily adopt a let-me-put-it-back-on-the-shelf mentality, furthering the idea that something better lies elsewhere. As we fall into what I call The Comparison Trap, we can end a relationship or commitment seeking someone else who ‘more fits what I’m looking for’ in an idealized way. Perel points out in this interview that
“staying power is not in fashion today. It’s not a virtue. It is not a value — so you need to make the staying worth it. People are bringing a consumer mentality to romantic relationships — ‘This isn’t the deal I signed up for, this is not the relationship I want, where is my ROI [return on investment]?’”.
We end up evaluating our market worth to decide if we want to work through relationships, rather than evaluating our relationships against our values.
Looking at our relationships with this lens optimizes for one thing only: optionality.
The trouble with optionality or a consumerist mentality is that when we do inevitably seek more, it is less likely to be rooted in meaning and passion. It is more likely to be change for the sake of change.
Even Perel, whose job as a sex therapist is focused on novelty and eroticism advocates that finding novelty in what we already have can be more valuable. It is a more sustainable approach to the balance between safety and passion. If we build our relationships in line with our own values rather than those impressed upon us by The Comparison Trap, we have a stronger chance to “want what we have” in life.
Now, it's less of a moral ordeal to break up with a job in search of a better one, but this mindset does not serve us unless we are guided by a strong internal compass.
Promotions
The Comparison Trap is perhaps most obvious in our careers. Careers are structured with an upwards trajectory. Enter: The Peter Principle.
The Peter Principle states that if we perform well in our job, we will likely be promoted to the next level of our organization's hierarchy. Regardless of our interest (or lack thereof) in taking on a different role, we will continue to rise up the ladder until we reach the point where we can no longer perform well.
As most companies are structured with a hierarchy, the financial incentives and societal expectations around promotion make comparison with others implicit. Thus, we are promoted until we can no longer perform well in our function, as the sum of these promotions have veered us so far off course.
Think of a great engineer with a deep interest in technology. While she enters the field interested in the craft of programming, she finds herself in the pursuit of a PM role because everyone around her agrees that this is what success looks like.
Such a misaligned outcome is rooted in more than just The Peter Principle. In addition to ignoring skills, many organizations or hierarchies ignore passion. We aren't encouraged to pursue lateral curiosity, only upwards mobility. Promotion becomes the only metric of us doing well at our jobs. We justify the loss of lateral moves or deepening knowledge in a field of interest and accept a projected set of values instead.
The Peter Principle highlights promotion’s greatest fallacy: advancement.
Promotion creates an illusion of growth. It dwindles the opportunity for us to reach our full potential, one that is rooted in passion. It’s an idea that dangles incentives rather than encouraging knowledge, curiosity, or vitality — the very ideals that constitute passion and eroticism. This type of distraction leads us to inherently compete with our peers, vying for limited spots rather than solely comparing the version of “me” that I am today against who I was yesterday and who I want to be tomorrow.
The Comparison Trap replaces the focus on our internal development with arbitrary external goals set for us by others. And to be very clear, comparison occurs outside the confines of a “traditional” corporate gig as well.
@Tech Twitter, I’m looking at you.
I see this type of peer comparison amongst founders building companies to writers building newsletters. Everyone is subject to the notion of comparison.
But is that something you even care about?
Defining Markers of Success
It would greatly benefit us all if we periodically asked ourselves the essential question above. Comparing ourselves against others rather than comparing ourselves against ourselves simply propels us further away from authenticity.
The danger is that we often don’t recognize when this is happening. This idea is one that Brene Brown discusses in her book The Gifts of Imperfection, where she breaks down her research on wholehearted living. Brown describes the concept of comparison as a blend of conformity and competition.
“At first it seems like conforming and competing are mutually exclusive, but they’re not. When we compare, we want to see who or what is the best out of a specific collection of ‘alike things’...We don’t compare our houses to the mansions across town; we compare our yard to the yards on our block. When we compare, we want to be the best or have the best of our group. The comparison mandate becomes this crushing paradox of ‘fit in and stand out!’...[to] be just like everyone else, but better.”
With that said, Brown also notes that
“letting go of comparison is not a to-do list item. For most of us, it’s something that requires constant awareness.”
Examining our motivation is critical. It forces us to understand and acknowledge that our motives have been shaped, at least in part, by society. When we work through that awareness, we allow ourselves the freedom to explore the unknown fearlessly, as we can trust that our decisions are directionally sound and rooted in our values. That we are not making choices and setting goals out of line with our passion.
These days, when we hear the word “comparison” our minds immediately jump to social media. You may have been wondering throughout this newsletter how technology enables The Comparison Trap, and I will discuss that next week.
Until then,
Shiv