Compare Yourself to Who You Were Yesterday, Not to Who Someone Else Is Today

I'm a Clinical psychologist and I spend 20 hours a week for 25 years Listening to people tell me about their lives And those people were people who were Just barely hanging on to the bottom of the world Up to people who were so successful you could hardly believe it Being a clinical psychologist if you really listen is like Being immersed in a Dostoevsky novel all the time You know Because it's amazing what people tell you if you listen to them Because they're so peculiar like They're like penguins or rhinoceroses or ostriches They're unlikely creatures Well you gotta improve right? And you might think Well, I'm a real fixer-upper and I'm really embarrassed about that Cause there are 50 things wrong with me And Like look at that guy and So now I feel all terrible because of The comparison and all of that First of all, it's unfair Especially by the time you're about 30 Your life has become quite idiosyncratic Let's say your life has eight dimensions Family, friends, intimate relationships You're Individually Positioned in all those dimensions Your life isn't like anyone else's life And so, you see someone who's doing better than you It's like you only see in one dimension at one slice of time So it's not reasonable You don't have the whole picture And then you Get down on yourself And take the spirit out of yourself And you get bitter and resentful There's nothing good about that But you do need to improve There's not as much of you as there should be So, what's the comparison? Well that's easy Just say okay well here's my position In time in space right now Here's my Virtues and fault I can be A little bit better tomorrow In some minor way Well That's the right comparison Cause you are very much like you Everything is the same about you Everything is the same about you And so, it's the perfect comparison You just don't have insight into the tragedy of someone else's life You might think well he's rich and successful It's like Yeah but you just don't know You don't know what his relationship is with his wife or his children You know you don't know that he's gone through two divorces And his daughter won't talk to him And one of his kids is schizophrenic and The point is You should be better than you are But it's not because you're worse than other people It's because you're not everything you should be And so, you got to pick the comparison right And then that's also ennobling And instantly hopeful There is absolutely no doubt that you can be Slightly better tomorrow than you are today There is definitely something that you can do today That will make you slightly better For the next day Always Okay You're 85 You have Alzheimer's You know You're done Sometimes you're done Most of the time you're not And most of the time there's something Within your grasp that you could Put right See that's the fundamental issue It's like, life is tragic It's full of suffering and it's full of malevolence There's no doubt about that And it's brutal And it's more brutal than you can even imagine in some ways Or willing to imagine But there's something you could put right And we don't know what would happen if You put everything you could right If you put it right And then we don't know what would happen if everyone did that But you can be certain that it would be less tragic And less malevolent and so Like You don't have anything better to do (Distorted)