Respecting others’ accomplishments does not require us to completely disregard our own. 

What am I doing with my life? she wonders. It’s 4 o’clock in the morning. She can’t eat. She can’t sleep. She opens her Snapchat to see her stories and to see everything that people accomplished that day. In one story, she finds a boy driving around with his friends, partying and having a good time. In another, she finds an old friend and thinks: why can’t I be her? or look like she does? why can’t I be happy like she is? She is nearing her breaking point. She wants to fit into this image that society has fabricated for her, but she can’t. She will never be able to emulate the mirage that our society has established. She’s hardened and she can’t feel feelings of joy and happiness that she once did. She doesn’t see herself as beautiful or unique, special or amazing. How could she? Everywhere she looks, she sees somebody prettier. Somebody smarter. Somebody better.

We all find ourselves in this position. Overcoming comparison is a seemingly impossible task; a battle to try and dismiss thoughts of insecurities and judgment. Somewhere in the course of human history, we determined that we should decide our own social and personal worth based on how we stack up against others. As a result, we are constantly making self evaluations. We are dictating who is living a more “perfect” life by comparing our cars and our homes, our GPAs and our test scores, our professions and our paychecks. We have even let the amount of Instagram followers influence our happiness. However, net-worth has never been a strong indication of self-worth.

Our society is setup to where we have created “goals.” We put a heavy importance on trends and how we should fit into them. Many of these trends and goals, however, are impossible to reach for most. But why do we even need to reach that? Or be that? We have put a huge emphasis on perfection and success, but by society’s expectations success is based on money. In many ways, we aren’t even comparing ourselves to anybody else. We are comparing ourselves to words: perfection, goals, success.

When we compare ourselves to others, it usually revolves around our passions or insecurities. This is because if it is important to us, we want to be the best at it. Or, if we feel like we don’t have a specific quality that somebody else does, we feel ashamed and wish we could have that trait. The idea should not simply be to copy the person that we admire, but to elicit the qualities that we applaud about them and seek to emulate that aspect.

It’s almost impossible to hide anything about ourselves anymore. With social media and the internet, all of our personal information can be accessed easily. Just through a quick google search, we can find out facts about almost anybody. Facts like where they live, what they do for a living, who they are married to, how many kids they have, etc… We Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook and share things that happen to us, things that we’ve done and things that we believe in. A large majority of us check up on our social medias and compare what we are doing to what others are doing. We vigorously scroll through endless amounts of pictures and posts that litter our feeds to see how we stand in collation with our peers and friends. But why? Why do we do this to ourselves? Why are we suffering from other people’s lives instead of enjoying our own? Instead of comparing, we should be focusing on all the amazing things in our own lives, all the amazing things we have and all the amazing things about ourselves. There is no need to compare ourselves and the things in our lives to others. Our lives are created perfectly to embody us.