Theodore Roosevelt is supposed to have said that comparison is the thief of joy. I notice the theft in myself regularly, and the peculiar thing is how arbitrary the trigger is. No comparing changes anything about my own situation, which was perfectly satisfactory two minutes earlier. And yet the satisfaction quietly drains out of it anyway.

What makes the comparison trap so effective is that it is both automatic and rigged. Automatic, because social ranking is not something we opted into; it is deep, ancient machinery that ran long before any of us arrived and does not ask permission to run now. And rigged, because the comparison set is never fair. You compare your own unedited interior, complete with every doubt and false start and abandoned draft, against another person's finished, curated exterior. It is a comparison between everything you know about yourself and the small, polished fragment they chose to show.

The move that has helped me most is not to stop comparing, which I suspect is beyond most of us, but to change the reference point. Compare against yourself a year ago. That comparison is at least fair, because you have full information on both sides, and it is actionable, because you are the only variable in it. There is a second and harder move, which is to notice that other people's success does not consume any of yours. So, as a reflection for today: who are you measuring yourself against? And what happens to that feeling if you measure against yourself instead?