Overlapping somewhat with the theme of the last piece, I’ve decided to talk about why I think using other people as reference material to rank ourselves might be misguided. To start off, I want to get into common scenarios such as privilege assessment as a way of solving for gratitude, or using celebrities, peers or social media power users as a way of ranking our personal goals. To make what I’m talking about a bit less opaque, something that I think frequently happens, is that we try to find or imagine some circumstance that invalidates our own such that we have an excuse to feel grateful. Maybe this takes the shape of looking at some nearby homeless situation, or thinking about some person starving in a far away place, but the function to my mind, appears to be fairly similar. Rather than being grateful simply because we understand that things going well is not guaranteed, I think we attempt to add some element of shame or remorse for being more successful or experiencing more abundance than someone else. On the flip side of this, we might look at others to find that they experience more success or abundance in an attempt to reason that our own goals or life inputs are inadequate in some way. In this piece I want to illustrate why I think living in this paradigm is both unnecessary and maladaptive if we seek an increased sense of wellbeing or success in our lives.
Although I do think that using others as a way of figuring out personal status and the quality of our goals or thinking is natural, I also think it’s a way of being better left to a time passed. In days where we lived at much lower population densities and had fewer available options, perhaps using peers or fellow members of our tribe and extended family to rank ourselves made some amount of sense. I would argue however, that in the current moment, with so many situations and people to choose from, the energy required to actually figure out who or what is worth paying attention to has increased an unfathomable amount it seems. My point is that there is really always a situation one can find or imagine that is far worse or far better, in our perception, than our own, but this in an of itself is not information that is useful for increasing personal wellbeing. As I mentioned in the first paragraph, part of the problem with utilizing perceived privilege as a way of figuring out how grateful we ought to be, is that the difference between us and other people is not a proxy for privilege. I’m not entirely sure how one reasons out how much privilege they have, but if it’s to be done I would suggest that it should be accompanied by thorough analysis of the histories of you and this other person or entity and the disparities present. Someone seemingly having less than or more than us is not by itself a proper metric to assess how privileged one might be. Additionally, because I think working out privilege in this way is flawed, trying to use this shoddy assessment to determine our gratitude is an exercise in futility and disappointment from what I can tell. If we want to be grateful, we can actually find perfectly valid reasons to be so, without pretending to know how lucky or not someone is. More on that in a moment, but first I want to talk about another important issue.
One element of this that is both sort of a philosophical issue and also I think a valid reason to change our habits around this topic, is that wellbeing, gratitude and personal goals are not directly competitive things. Being that humans are all too well- designed to compete, I think we to our detriment apply this Darwinistic lens to everything that we do, even when it makes little sense. There is nothing zero-sum or necessarily scarce about gratitude, wellbeing and our personal feelings and ultimate goals. We can have as much of or as many of any of these things as we want, and what others are doing in a far away place, has little effect on our internal sense of peace. While some goal or strategy may lose to others in a context where you are trying to get a certain position or win something, making it perfectly logical to study other people’s processes, this isn’t a perfect parallel to our inner lives. As I’ve been watching myself say a lot lately, there is no external, perfect and objective standard to figure out all of these “should” or “ought” questions as far as I can tell. What we can manage is to attempt to do things that improve ourselves while also bringing others up, thus creating win-win situations. If we have a specific goal we can use science to figure out what may best get us to it in our desired way or at a particular velocity, but sussing out what goals are worth having appears to rest on us.
Putting a bow on this, what is an alternative way of figuring out how to be grateful or give some anchoring to our goals and sense of self-worth? As we’ve covered by now, while it is not the end of the world or incomprehensible that we’d want to interact with others in some way to keep us out of complete lunacy, at the same time I think we benefit from relying on that exercise less. You’re gonna have what desires and goals that you have, and gratitude in my mind, to be real, requires finding good reasons to look differently at the things that we already have from an internal point of view. No amount of consultation can tell us whether our sense of ourselves is valid or not. The best we can do is make sure that out thinking is not too wrapped up in that which would create bad outcomes for ourselves and the world around us. If we can ensure a benign or positive, or perhaps minimally negative effect from our words, thoughts and actions I think that is the sweet spot. As stated, while discourse or exploration may be totally worth it sometimes, it’s not a replacement for introspection, meditation and deep honesty and analysis of how we want to be, in our minds and in the world. In other words, though it might be sort of lame, I can’t give a perfect “one size fits all” answer because these things fall in the territory of almost completely intrapersonal space.
More or less the finish line of what I’ve got to say this time, but I’m sure more pedantry could take place as usual. I hope you found this piece useful and I want you to know I appreciate you. Be well.
Orion Aeneas Webster,
FourthEye author
FourthEye 
Leave a comment