RE: Comparing Yourself To Others: Knowing Your Identity
the thing is: this is a competitive society.
even the goals we set for ourselves, thinking there are customized for ourselves are based on success/happiness models of others.
we see other are happy when they are rich and have financial freedom and conclude that we will probably be as happy as they are when we have roughly the same amount of money or freedom as they have.
in order the technically specify the reaching of our goals to happiness - we actually copy those specs from those people.
and thus, in a way, we are competing with them.
if we all were living in a cave with food nearby and our loving spouse in the nearest cave - we might be as happy as can be, but we don't.
we live in a society and we can't ignore others and we can't unconscionably comparing ourselves to them and to some extent competing with them.
You make a very good point. I agree. I think there are definitely things we can learn from people or others who have walked the path before us, or succeeded in something. But I also think comparing to others in a sense of like "I need to be like that" then your not really living out "your" life but trying to be someone else. This can be a very bad behavior because people lose their own identity through it.