There is a widespread disease affecting many of us today. I call it a disease not because it is a medical condition but because it is a dis-ease; that is, it is something that takes away our inner peace and happiness; it often leaves us restless, unable to sleep and worried. This disease is called “comparing ourselves with others.”
The symptoms of this disease include:
Using other people to measure one’s progress in life
Trying all means to appear better than others
Doing everything in one’s power to put people down, make them look small and unequal to us.
Talking about people in a bad light out of jealousy.
Complexes such as inferiority complex, superiority complex and praying against rather than praying for others.
When this disease strikes a person, he or she becomes perpetually unhappy because of the unending competitions he or she has to engage in with virtually all other human beings in this world. Also, a person sick of the disease is never fully alive, everything he or she does from dawn to dusk is solely aimed at making impressions to others. Perfection becomes a mask he or she has to wear constantly like a lady with very heavy make-up.
In my country, there is a type of generator called “I beta pass my neighbour.” This philosophy of “beta pass neighbour” is so entrenched in our psyches that we never appreciate anything we have unless we are sure it is bigger, better, more sophisticated or more expensive than that of others. Until we learn to complement rather than compete with people, the world would forever remain a place of enmity; a jungle of some sort; an animal kingdom where the strongest survive at the expense of the weak.
There is a feeling of excitement we get when we hear the sins and failings of others. It makes us feel good just to know that we are ahead of people whether by intelligence, spirituality or even wealth. What we don’t understand is that each time we put someone down, talk about or laugh at their weakness, we are doing same to ourselve. We are making our listeners understand that we are smaller than those we are gossiping about since our happiness depend on their downfall.
It takes real humility on our part to accept the fact that we are not better than anyone else; that we cannot even be better than anyone else because each one of us has his own race to run and the worst mistake we can make is to leave our tracks and join others in their tracks. In the end, we only succeed in helping others get faster to their finish point while our own race is yet to be run.
Stop comparing yourself with others. Step out of your competitive zone. No one has got it all. God gave each person on earth unique gifts so that we can provide for what is lacking in each other not so that we can fight ourselves.