Unfinished Season
Nothing new. I started two seasons and never finished them. And not series because I don’t watch TV.
I don’t write to myself anymore. I used to say, “I got tired of talking to myself, so now I write to myself.” One might think that I also got tired of writing to myself, but despite being a valid analysis, it’s wrong.
Today I had one of those conversations that seem to be invented by and for indie movie directors full of clichés. It started with a question that led to the topic of ‘drugs,’ which inevitably led to the word ‘control’.
That control, or rather the lack of it, that people seem to have, despite their tireless quest for absolute control. But that’s a topic for another day.
From the word ‘control’ came all the Eastern philosophy: letting things flow, Buddhism, Christmas puddings (indoor ones), and how in the West we lack a lot of that and tend to complicate things too much.
The conversation stopped there, and they ended with, “Anyway, I’m like normal people; if I applied my own philosophy, I would explode.”
And honestly, I have no idea why, but that reminded me of how it used to be very common for me to feel terrible by comparing myself to others. I decided to apply a little rule that I later discovered Jordan Peterson proposes as one of his rules in his book.
Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today
Let’s apply a binary value scale that hardly coincides with reality but serves the point: Beautiful and Ugly.
The situation is that you have beautiful and ugly things, and that other person also has their beautiful and ugly things. What we always do is look at their beautiful things and compare them to our ugly things, a super fair deal, right? And that way, you never see your beautiful things.
Moreover, it’s most likely that the “beautiful” thing we see isn’t even that cool in reality, or it might even be one of those fake things sold on Instagram to have a nice feed.
That’s why it’s better to compare ourselves to our version from yesterday. Because it’s the only fair comparison, and because if you did it once, you can do it the same or better.