Comparison is the thief of joy!
Posted on June 10, 2020 by Samantha Sieverling, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.
A story about how comparison is the thief of joy!
The story of Comparison
A saying I heard recently was, Comparison is the thief of joy. What might you ask, does that have to do with storytelling? Well, let me tell you a story.
There was this girl, she was smart, brave, and beautiful. She grew up in a house full of love and never knew what it was to want. Her life seemed perfect (at this point, you may have realized that this is not my life story, lol). Anyway, she went to school and landed a great job and when she was at school, she met and fell in love with the love of her life. All was well in her world. They married and were living happily ever after.
It was kind of innocent, but she signed up a social media account one evening on a whim. It was fun to connect with her friends and family, but sometimes it wasn’t so fun. Her friends always looked amazing and often she was in sweats and a ponytail, it made her feel sad that she couldn’t be out partying like her friends, but she and her husband were saving up for their new house.
One day she noticed that her brother got a new car and as she looked at her well-loved old Honda and thought, wow my car isn’t so great. It no longer gave her the joy it use to give her and she dreamed of when she would buy a new car.
She saw her friends starting to buy houses, but she and her husband were still renting and when they did buy a new house, it had to be close to the city for their jobs, so it wasn’t the nicest house, but they agreed it was good enough and would save hours on the commute. But then she noticed that her friends were buying newer nicer houses and she looked around at the starter house she and her husband bought and she felt like it wasn’t enough.
One day as she was browsing her social media, she noticed that one of her friends got divorced and had married this amazing rich man and she looked at her husband and thought to herself, he’s never going to make that much money, why am I here?
She started looking at what others had and she found herself wanting. Wanting a nicer car, a nicer home, a “better husband”. As she continued to compare her life to others it became tough to look at her social media accounts any longer. And then something funny happened as she got more and more distance from her social media accounts.
When she went around living her life and not making comparisons to everyone else, she found that she did have enough, that she didn’t need a new car, a new job, a new house, and her husband loved her very much.
What stories, what comparisons are we making, that are preventing us from seeing what we have at the moment? What comparisons are we making that aren’t helping us, but instead hurting us?
