In this day and age of social media, where all we see is perfection, we often tend to compare ourselves with others. We are constantly looking at the lives of other people. Someone’s picture is so perfect. Somebody has such a wonderful lifestyle. We see the best of everything in these curated moments of others and feel that we aren’t as good as these people, which in turn tends to become the reason for our insecurities.
Comparison is a natural thing to do for most of us. This act of comparing ourselves to others begins from our childhood. Our parents compare us to the children of neighbors, our cousins, or maybe our friends. The same thing is acted out at school, where our teachers compare us to our better performing peers in the class. This leads to the feeling of low self-esteem for some of us. It makes us over-analyze our every action and stresses us out when we think that we may not fit into the mould that society has set for us.
Unfortunately, in this current time, social media has helped warp reality. We tend to forget, or maybe ignore the fact, that people only showcase the best of their lives on social media. Social media comparison just makes us feel bad about ourselves. But we need to remember that it doesn’t make us lose our worth in any way whatsoever. We are all different. We all have our own distinguishing personalities. We see the best of others and we want that for ourselves. It’s a simple want that everyone has, in one way or another.
Comparison can be a positive thing when we get inspired by other people and aspire to achieve great things. We should not shrink ourselves in awe of other peoples’ successes. We should stand up for ourselves. We should be aware of our own individuality. It helps us admire someone else’s beauty, success and talent without devaluing our own. Someone can be better than us in a specific field of expertise whereas we can also be better than someone else in another field. That is life.
We should identify our strengths and abilities. We are all unique. We are also all flawed in some way. Hence, we should also learn to accept our individual flaws and our own unique personalities. When we accept our imperfections, then nothing can make us feel bad about ourselves. Once we develop our strong sense of self-worth, then comparisons won’t hurt as much.
I have felt (and sometimes still feel) these things on a personal level, because I have gone through similar things in my life. Many a times, I used to get a certain unpleasant feeling looking at the pictures of people I had never met; a stranger in every sense of the word and yet I second guessed my own appearance, comparing myself to them. I hated the rounded shape of my face. But now, after having learnt to accept myself, I think it’s cute. I just had to learn to look at things in a different light. With time, I have learnt to embrace my blemishes and my weaknesses. I am at all times, working on myself to be the best version of myself. Having said that, I am aware of the fact that I still have room for improvements which I still work on in my own time.
Conclusively, we should try to stay away from ugly comparisons and we should invest our energy into productive things rather than having toxic feelings about the things that we don’t have. In fact, as I have mentioned before, comparison isn’t inherently bad. We should rather take comparisons as an opportunity to work on ourselves. In the meantime, let’s just go a little easy on ourselves.
