How to Get Rid of Jealousy & Comparison - Jordan Peterson

Say I see somebody in the room here, hypothetically, and I say, oh my gosh, I would love to, you know, have that kind of a life. I'd love to make that kind of money, right? And I compare myself to them, right? I'm saying, oh my gosh, what if one day I can be that person? What if one day I can have that life, right? How do I go from there to actually wanting to live it and become a reality versus not allowing envy and resentment pin me against them? Well, the first thing I think you need to understand is that these people that you're comparing yourself to, you don't really know very well. What that means is that you see their shiny outside, but you don't see the reality of their life. And so what you're, you know, maybe you're in California, see someone speeding down the road in a convertible Porsche, and you think, oh man, what a lucky bastard. The truth of the matter is that he's thinking about wrapping his expensive sports car around the next cement pillar that he comes close to. You know, you can't tell, and people have hard lives, and even people who are comparatively fortunate have hard lives. And so the ideal that you're observing that makes you jealous and resentful is in large part an illusion that's created by your own mind. You know, I can give you just one example. I know a fair number of extremely wealthy people, and most of them, most of the people I happen to know are people who've made their money themselves. And I tell you, man, they have a burden of responsibility that would crush me, would crush the typical person. They're just working flat out like 90 hours a week, and they have thousands of people depending on them. And, you know, they have their money, and they have their status, and that's not nothing. But don't be thinking that there isn't a price to be paid for that. You know, they don't see their families. They're often divorced. They don't see their children grow up, and they don't have time off. Now, there are wealthy, what would you call, playboy types, I suppose, who live out the dreams of wealth of a foolish 14-year-old, but they're not that common, and you have to be careful of what you're jealous of because you don't really know what it is. And then the other thing that's kind of useful is to, well, to understand that you're different from everyone else. And this is especially true as you get older. When you're 17 or 16 or something like that, comparing yourself to other people makes a certain amount of sense because 16- and 17-year-olds, they're kind of the same, you know, which is why when you go off to university, you can make friends so quickly. It's like I'm just about 60. It takes me like 15 years to make a friend now, you know. As opposed to the two months that it took when I was 17. You're quite different from other people, and you shouldn't be comparing yourself to them because they're not like you, you know. They don't have your family. They don't have your temperament. They don't have your troubles. They don't have your abilities. The only person that has those is you. And this is why one of the rules, I think it's rule four, is compare yourself to who you were yesterday and not to who someone else is today. And, see, that's a game you can win because you could be a little better today than you were yesterday. And that's a good thing. You're a little better. That's a good thing. And, you know, no doubt there are some things that you could improve. You know, if you sit and meditate for any length of time about what you're not doing optimally, answers will spring to mind. You know, you could be getting up earlier. Comparing yourself to who you are now, that's a game you can win. And, like, I've seen this be effective in many, many cases. In my clinical practice, for example, it's like you take stock of where you are, you know, what your advantages are and what your disadvantages are, and then you start, with a little humility, on the path of incremental improvement. And, you know, incremental improvement compounds. And so you can get a long ways. You see, because trajectory, in some sense, is more important than position for human beings. I mean, if you're starving to death, and that's not the situation that I'm describing, but, you know, if you've got the bare necessities of life and so you're not surrounded by absolute privation, what you really want is to see that you're on an uphill path, you know, something that's got the right slope. And you can start anywhere on that path. And you can improve half a percent a day, or a quarter of a percent a day, and you think, well, that's not very much. It's like, it's a hundred percent. If it's a quarter of a percent a day, it's a hundred percent in four years. And that doesn't count compounding, you know, which means it's actually going to happen a lot faster. And that's duplicatable. Anybody can do that. Anybody can do that. It's not just applicable to the most talented person or the least talented. No, I think that the possibility that you can make yourself slightly better on a continual basis is, I think that's something that's accessible to everyone. I think that's equivalent to leading a virtuous life. And, you know, I talked about the terrible catastrophe in some sense of differences in intelligence and differences in conscientiousness and so forth, and the downside of the meritocracy, but there is something to be said for virtue and truth. You know, and that is one thing. Another thing that I've noticed about people who've been phenomenally successful is that they really do everything they can to live a truthful life. And that you can get a bloody long ways by being honest. It's really something. And so the problem with comparing yourself to other people, people tend to do that a lot when they're teenagers, and they need to do that to some degree because they're trying to calibrate who they are and they're also trying to fit into the social group. And they need to do that. That's why it's so important for teenagers what other people think of them. You don't want a teenager who doesn't care what other people think of them. That's not good. Now, that can go too far, right? You can care only what other people think. I know they're extreme. Yes, exactly. But the problem with comparing yourself to other people, there's a bunch of them. One is envy is not helpful. And it's also a form of delusion, you know. I know enough about people, particularly from my clinical work, to know that you can see the shiny outside of someone, and maybe they're wealthy, and they have material possessions that you don't have. But you have no idea about the particularities of their life and what they might be suffering from or why they might be suffering from it. And so you look at the outside, and you see, you know, someone in a Maserati, red Maserati with a hot blonde in the passenger seat. You think, man, he's got it all. And you don't know that he's, like, racked with guilt constantly and in a sweat because his crooked business dealings are about to fall down on his head. And so that kind of envy, it's a surface delusion. The only person that you really can compare yourself in some real sense is you because you're the only one, your previous instantiation is the only person who matches your talents and your limitations perfectly. And you can strive to be somewhat better than you were. And you can attain that, too. That's the other thing that's so good about it, is that certainly, even if you're not very disciplined, you can be 1% better than you are in two months. And that's 6% better in a year, which is quite a lot, especially because it compounds. And in five years with compounding, you're way better than you were. And that's a good thing to know, especially that it can also be done incrementally. So that, see, it removes envy because you're not envious of who you were yesterday unless a catastrophe has beset you. It removes envy. But it also sets you in a position where you can reward yourself for genuine, small-scale, implementable undertakings because you can say, well, you know, I set out to improve myself in this manner and I've made this much progress, and hooray for me. And that observation of progress towards a desired goal, that's the core of positive emotion. So happiness, the happiness that people claim to want, is to be found in the observation of progress towards a valid goal. We know that neurophysiologically. We know it psychopharmacologically. That's what positive emotion is for. It's just one profound form of positive emotion. It's to signify that you are moving properly towards a properly valued goal. And that brings up another issue, which is in my writings constantly, that you need a high goal. And the highest goals, whether people like it or not, the highest goals are religious, by definition, because the highest things are, by definition, religious. Well, you've got to improve, right? And you might think, well, I'm a real fixer-upper and I'm really embarrassed about that because there's 50 things wrong with me and, like, look at that guy, and so now I feel all terrible because of the comparison and all of that. First of all, it's unfair, because especially by the time you're about 30, by the time you're about 30, your life has become quite idiosyncratic, you know? Like, let's say your life has eight dimensions, family, friends, intimate relationships, health. You know, you can kind of lay them out. You're individually positioned in all those dimensions. Your life isn't like anyone else's life. And so you see someone who's doing better than you. It's like you're only seeing one dimension at one slice of time. So it's not reasonable. You don't have the whole picture. And then you get down on yourself and take the spirit out of yourself and you get bitter and resentful. It's like there's nothing good about that. But you do need to improve, because there's not as much of you as there should be.