Comparison - The quiet theft of "enoughness".

Comparisons... just one more item, on an ever-expanding buffet of human habits, capable of turning a perfectly good morning into a very bad one, in the blink of an eye. We might wake up, feeling relatively chipper, coffee in hand, birds-a-chirping, hair acceptable, with a B+ for emotional stability. And then Wham!..

Your online scrolling uncovers some bloke you sort-of-knew at school, standing shirtless and barefoot in a Tuscan lemon grove, beside his perfect CEO wife who rescues donkeys and has won awards for helping old people cross busy roads. Their four, suspiciously blond, symmetrical children are all dressed in linen clothing, eating organic peaches.

Exactly 45 minutes later, you are questioning every decision you have made since 2003.

We, the people, have always compared ourselves to one another. Long before portrait painters, photographs and Pinterest, we were quietly assessing our neighbours and friends, our waistlines and our wallets. The big difference these days, is only related to the sample size. We no longer just compare oursleves to the folks in the cave next door, or the village, or the valley floor, but to absolutely everyone. All the time.

Hmm.. they look more successful than me.. and more attractive. And fitter... Better at golf, perhaps... More spititually aware....Emotionally available... Love that fridge..

Modern life has somehow convinced us that everyone else is simultaneously wealthier, calmer, better, happier and more mature than we are. Which would actually be quite funny, if it wasn't so bloody exhausting.

Mainly because comparison almost never stays on the surface of our day. It burrows like a hedgehog in the leaf litter. What began as casual observation, quickly becomes deliberate self-evaluation. "Am I behind in my work and obligations?.. Should I be better dressed?.. Should my sex life really be that depressing?.. Do I stand a snowball's chance-in-hell of getting that promotion?..

Comparison has a remarkable ability to transform other people's lives into a measuring stick against our own, global brand. And yet the truly strange thing is that most of us already know the comparison is wholly unfair. Intellectually, we understand we are comparing our real, messy lives to someone else’s curated snapshots. We know social media is edited, staged, cropped, chopped and wrinkle-filtered. We even suspect the people pictured are being held together with emotional duct tape, behind the over-staged scenes.

So beneath that very superficial surface, what is lurking? It is really true that everyone else has discovered the Rosetta Stone for life, while we remain utterly lost in translation? Do we just want to be them?

Nope... It seems that comparison is almost never about wanting what someone else has, even though that's how it might feel. It has its roots bedded in the fear that we may not actually be enough. A fear which reaches down into our very insides. Women compare the ageing process, men look at comparative status. Parents compare their kids, owners their dogs, couples their intimacy. Everyday existence has turned in to a collective, performance metric.

We now Go Compare holidays, homes, relationships, productivity, morning routines, emotional intelligence, sourdough starters, and whether someone appears effortlessly French while buying tomatoes at the farmers market. Gosh, I do love their fridge...

Ok, so there really is a humourous side to it all, and that humour is the gentle handbrake of the human ego. But beneath it, lies something a little more tender. Comparison very often reveals a deep and melancholy longing.

If we find oursleves envying someone else's self-confidence, it might be becasue we miss our own courage. If we jealousize over another persons professional or public visibility, we might just be aching to be seen ourselves. When we roll our eyes at the guy sporting the coral-pink tuxedo, we may be fearing the fact we have stayed too small, for too long.

Comparison, and its evil twin, envy, when we soften them enough to become honest, can sometimes reveal the un-lived and un-loved parts of ourselves that wait patiently beneath the surface of our lives. Which is possibly why comparisons can feel so darn painful. They pull us out of the extraordinary beauty of our own "ordinary" and make us stare at everyone else's success stories. We almost stop noticing what is already there. The good stuff. All decent and worthwhile. We become less present inside our own, perfectly valid experiences.

Comparison erases enoughness.

Not perhaps because our lives lack value, but because when we direct our attention outwards, we will inevitably distort any perspective inwards.

Then irony here (and there is plenty) is that the very individuals to whom we are so desperate to compare ourselves, are busy doing exactly the same thing. The family with the nice fridge envy the freedom of the couple who go on a City Break every other weekend. The visibly succesful business person is longing for a bit of peace and personal space. The metro-sexual couple who get a new car every year are secretly desperate for four, blond, symmetrical kids.

We are so good at romaticising the lives we are not living, and throwing mental tomatoes at our own. Which kind of indicates to me, that by definition, comparisons are built on the sandy foundations of imagination, rather than the concrete of reality.

The whole thing is utterly exhausting. The goalposts not only keep moving, but it turns out that is us who are actually moving them.

So let's face it. We will always be able to find someone that we see as younger, richer, wiser. More successful, more aware, more healed. Better dressed, better followed on TikTok. Someone in a Tuscan lemon grove with thier shirt off feeding their kids, orgainc peaches. Whatever...

The freedom can only begin when we stop treating the perception of another person's life, as evidence of our own imagined mundaneness. That we are somehow failing ourselves.

At the end of the day, why does someone else's succcess need to be submitted as proof of our insufficiency? Why does anyone else's anything have to diminish any part of our everything?

Let's all make a silent pact, to stop asking "how do I measure up?" and use all that energy to search for a bit more enoughness.

Enough rest, enough connection, enough peace and meaning.

Enough with performing, already...

A pact to return to ouselves and to quietly ask what it would feel like to "fully inhabit the life that is already mine".

Because perhaps our wholehearted wholeness was never hiding inside comparison.

It was just sat on the sidelines, waiting to be asked to dance.

On Platform 13, wholeness isn’t found - it’s remembered. Because loss is loss, worthiness is universal, and no one is alone. We are all in this together.