DoctorOz: Jordan Peterson on Envy and Competing with Yourself

The best person to compare yourself to is you yesterday and not someone else today. We're all living in a world of continual comparison to others that leads to fluctuating emotions of smug superiority or desperate insecurity and big question is how do we stop measuring our self-worth by someone else's standards especially when social media is the main way especially a lot of young people to find themselves. Well I think there's two things the first thing is you should figure out who to compare yourself to and I think the best person to compare yourself to is you yesterday and not someone else today and the reason for that is you don't know anything about these people that you're comparing yourself to usually like one of the things I've noticed is that it doesn't take much discussion with someone no matter how successful they are you scratch below the surface and you find that their life is consists of trouble and suffering in in proportions that you could hardly imagine almost everyone is dealing with some serious problem personal problem or problem in their family and and relative status I mean I suppose it's better to be rich and miserable than poor and miserable but you know the misery is universal and so what you're comparing yourself to if you're envious is it's an illusion and it's it's not a fair race to to be racing against someone else but it's a fair race to be racing against yourself you could be slightly better than you are and that will actually the thing about that that's so cool and I think the the psychological literature really indicates this is that slow incremental improvement from your initial baseline can take you places that you couldn't possibly imagine and envy is only a it's a impediment to that and then it's an illusory impediment too because those other people they don't have it as good as you think they do you've talked frequently about how stories the old tradition the bible yeah can remind us of deep fundamental insights of who we are yeah I'm going to put an image up of Cain and Abel it's a story you've talked about quite frequently what does this story teach us about envy and well what happens you see Cain and Abel are actually the first two human beings they're the first two real human beings because Adam and Eve are created by God and so in some sense well they're not like us but Cain and Abel are born and they're two sons and they they enter a state of mortal enmity you know and the reason for that is that Abel makes sacrifices to God and Cain makes sacrifices to God and Abel's sacrifices produce success and Cain's produce failure now you know the sacrifices are very concrete they're making burnt offerings and that seems very anachronistic old-fashioned and incomprehensible to modern people but the idea was that you could offer something of value you could let go of something of value in the present and you could offer that up the smoke would rise to God so he could detect the quality of your offering and if the quality of what you were sacrificing in the present was high enough then the future would work out for you and this is an unbelievably brilliant insight because human beings are the only creatures that have really figured out consciously that you can let go of something that you need and want now and forego gratification and you will actually improve your future so it's a huge deal now it's a huge deal that this was discovered you know it's the discovery of the future and so it's a massively important story you're right discovery of time it's the discovery of time yes and it's the discovery that you can actually act in the present so that you can bargain with the future and it actually works so it's a real miracle so and then what happens is that Cain's offerings aren't accepted and Abel's are and this makes Cain very very angry and no wonder because you know if you're working hard and and it isn't working you know people aren't happy with you and you're not making progress through your life then you get bitter and that's what happens to Cain and so then he goes and has a conversation with God and he says like what's up with this world you created I'm working myself to death here you know and my and nothing's working for me and my brother Abel well everything's coming easy to him everyone loves him what's happening and God says something like this he says sin has made its entry into your dwelling place into your home and sin means to miss the target and but it's it's it's in this metaphor it's presented as a living thing it's fire arrow and you miss your bullseye that's a sin that's a sin it's a sin to miss the target so you can do that by not aiming or not having the skill anyways God tells it Cain it's a terrible thing tell him he says sin is waiting at your doorstep and you've invited it in to your life evil and you've entered into a creative union with it and it's that creative union with this evil that you've invited in that's compromising your sacrifices and that's the cause of all your suffering and Cain is devastated by this because he's already not happy that you know Abel is doing extraordinarily well and all his work is going for naught and now he goes and complains to God about the structure of the world and God says you look to yourself your sacrifices are not what they should be and you've made terrible mistakes that you're not taking responsibility for and Cain he can't tolerate that the story says his countenance falls he becomes absolutely enraged at the structure of existence it's not only that he's suffering but that he now realizes that the suffering is self-induced and he can't tolerate that and he's so angry at at being and at God that he decides he'll kill Abel and it's a terrible thing because Abel is also his ideal so he kills his own ideal right and then he tells God that his suffering is more than he can bear and God marks him and sends him on his way where is he running to well that's the question I mean Cain's descendants degenerate generation after generation he's he's running he's running away from his terrible crime to hell there's no other way of putting it and I'm not speaking metaphysically one of Cain's descendants is Tubal Cain and Tubal Cain is the first person who makes in tradition he's the first person who makes weapons of war so it's and Cain's sons are even more dangerous than Cain and so there's this idea in this old story that it's this envious rage coupled with this inability to make appropriate sacrifices that produces misery and then that misery can can desire to manifest itself in the world in the exaggeration of suffering and malevolence and that leads to social collapse so if we've made a bargain in our lives and acknowledge that there's time and we can negotiate the future based on sacrifices we make today then we have tremendous control over the world around us Cain could have stopped sinning stopped missing the target stopped constructing a world with evil yeah he could have learned from Abel he could have made the right sacrifice he killed him instead he killed him and there's all there's this ambivalence in the in the story it appears as though Cain's sacrifices are second rate you can never tell because there's some you know look sometimes people work really hard and things don't work out for them there's an arbitrariness about life you know and that is left ambivalent in the story although there is this strong undercurrent suggesting that Cain is playing fast and loose with the divine well let's say he's playing fast and loose with the future well that's not going to work everyone knows it's like if you want the future to work out properly the sacrifices that you make now have to be real and people understand that I ask my students most of whom are children of first generation immigrants at the University of Toronto and some pretty dedicated to their to their task say well what sacrifices did your parents make so that you could go to university you know and I mean they moved countries they they left everyone behind I mean this idea of sacrifice which is concretized in the story of Cain and Abel is something that every modern person understands but it's useful to understand it in an articulated way you it's so strange that you can bargain with the future and that it works says well I'll forego this gratification now I'll I'll I'll take the harder route now and the future will open itself up positively and that actually works and if you don't do that bargain you made the point that it always comes back to get you yeah and everyone knows that everyone knows that every undergraduate who procrastinates is guilty about it they're torturing themselves atheistic or not there's no escape from this you know they wake up the night before or maybe it's the night before their final and they put everything off they're sweating they feel weak how do you cultivate how do you cultivate acting better today for a more successful tomorrow that is a challenge for a good slap sliver of the population yeah well I would say humility is the key to that it's like look if you have a child and you love that child and you want the child to develop you set them a task that exceeds their current domain of competence but you set them a task that they have a reasonable probability of succeeding at right not not complete because then it's too it's too easy it has to be a challenge and so you you you look at the child and you say well here's your ability level here's one more step you could take right well then you have to do the same to yourself you have to take stock of yourself um that's a meditational exercise it's like who am I where are my flaws and and they're not going to be something you want to face and then you think well what small thing could someone as flawed as me do that I would do that would improve me and then it's humiliating because you think oh my god really I have to do something that small that's all incapable of it's like yeah that's your lot man and you better be humble enough to accept it and then you you make that small improvement but then what you find is that small improvements those things accumulate those things compound and you can start moving ahead very very rapidly with the succession of small improvements and there's a metaphysical element to this but you know it's also the basis of behavior therapy which is the widest used widest employed brand of of clinical psychology now in the world behavior therapy it's like well let's figure out what your problem is let's figure out what your goal is let's break down your problem until we have a small enough piece that you can address it successfully let's see if you can address it successfully in the next week and go and try and if you can't we'll cut it down a little bit more and let's assume that incremental improvement is going to move you up and it does but it does require that humility and it's not a matter of comparing yourself to other people it's not helpful it's like what are you doing wrong and you can ask yourself that right and then the problem with asking yourself that is you get an answer and it's not an answer you want it's like oh my god really that's what i'm doing wrong how could i be so foolish and blind that that would be my mistake and how can i be so little and useless that this is all i can do to improve it you got to get that's that's to get down on your knees in some sense before the ideal that you're attempting to manifest you know and to show where you are in relationship to that but the the upside of that is that it's an unbelievably powerful process you can put yourself together to a staggering degree merely by ceasing doing those things you know you shouldn't do so don't be king dr pearson thank you very much my pleasure