Comparison Is the Thief of Joy
We often overlook our qualities because our focus is always on the other person
“Comparison is the thief of joy.”
A beautiful quote by Theodore Roosevelt that we all must have come across often in our lives but hardly could adhere to it.
This saying is relevant today where every second person you'll meet is unhappy and on being asked they would just say that, "I am depressed."
People of different age groups become the victim of this. The reasons may vary and ‘comparison’ is one of them.
Seeing the competition around in this fast-paced world, we sometimes get overwhelmed.
If a person in your office who joined a few months back got an appraisal and you couldn’t, despite working hard for years. That very moment your morale goes down. You start to feel like quitting the job.
This is human nature. But having such a mindset won't let us survive in this highly competitive environment.
To have a peaceful and healthy life, we need to alter our mindset. A negative mind leads to destruction.
The most influencing factor in this is social media where people post about everything. A friend of yours posts a picture of having dinner in a 5-Star hotel or a vacation in the Maldives. You immediately will start feeling sad about your life saying that it’s boring and futile. You’ll be depressed for not having enough money to go to the Maldives for a vacation.
So many thoughts are produced in our minds in a day and most of them are negative where we are thinking low about ourselves. This behavior has become common among school students as well.
At the age of free-spiritedness where children must be least worried about anything, these kids are talking about things like depression. Because comparison exists at a higher level among teenagers which causes low self-esteem. Children at this stage are conscious of everything from physical looks and appearance to their scorecards.
A girl whose friend qualified for a beauty pageant would start believing she is ugly because she couldn't.
This takes me back to a classroom memory where one of my classmates behaved weirdly on seeing her best friend always scoring more marks than her and getting the appraisal and attention of all the teachers. She stopped coming to school, and her parents informed us she keeps crying in her room and didn't tell us the reason.
Though she was excellent in art and her best friend couldn't even draw a straight line. Unfortunately, she was comparing someone else's strength with her weakness, instead of paying attention to her strength. A fish can swim so well deep under the water and a bird could soar high in the sky. Imagine fish compares herself with a bird or bird with a fish.
They are perfect in their tasks that God has assigned them. We often overlook our qualities because our focus is always on the other person. If there's one person in this world that you should compare yourself to is YOU. Track your growth and progress without comparing it to anyone else in the world.
Be grateful for each step of improvement as you move forward in life, and don't let your joy be stolen away!
