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)