Shortcut to unhappiness →
“I used to be on Facebok a lot, but found that it left me feeling bad about my life” - confessed a friend of Stan James. Spend time on Facebook “watching” the glamorous lives of your “not-so-close” Facebook friends. It will make you feel bad about your life.
Your “not-so-close” Facebook friends are the new TV Stars writes Stan James in a thought provoking post. These people “are almost universally beautiful, live in interesting places, do interesting work (if they work at all), are unfailingly witty, and never have to do any cleaning. They never even need to use the toilet.” […]
Stan is hinting at a succulent question: Why our lives seem not-so-amazing in comparison with the lives of our “not-so-close” Facebook friends or the lives of the TV stars? Part of the answer can be found within the question: it is because we’re making comparisons. The other part of the answer has to do with desire. Let’s take a look at why comparison and desire can lead to unhappiness.
“Things are not always what they seem”. The way we make comparisons is inherently flawed. Look at the image above. Which one of the two light blue circles is bigger? Most people answer that the left one. The truth is that both circles are equal in size but they occur to us as they had different sizes. The different contexts (i.e: the dark blue circles) around each of the circles distort the reality. This means that the way people occur to us can be highly distorted simply because we’re making our evaluations within the wrong context (i.e: we don’t know them and their lives enough to create the right context to make accurate evaluations)
This type of comparison triggers questions like “What do they have and I don’t?” And so, our mind leaves on a trip to discover our insufficiencies. We wish we had all those things that are missing. We start desiring, wanting things that should exist in our lives so that we can too, be in a state of happiness, similar to those no-so-close Facebook friends of ours.
The sad reality is that no matter how fast we would cover those insufficiencies, we would always return to the same state of “i’m not happy, there’s something missing”. James Hong who cofounded hotornot.com paints this “vicious circle” very well: “When you get a Boxter you wish you had a 911, and you know what people who have 911s wish they had? They wish they had a Ferrari.”
Even though I’m not a religious person, I know for sure why you shall not “desire your neighbor’s house nor field or male or female slave or donkey or anything that belongs to your neighbor”: it’s useless.
Most of the time, what leads us to unhappiness has a lot to do with the way we evaluate the world. Survival across millions of years trained our brain to evaluate and decide quickly. Speedy evaluations are also efortless. That’s because they’re based on what our brain “already knows” so we don’t have to think to much.
Evaluating and deciding quickly may be useful when you’re about to be hit by a car but not when creating your relationship with the world. Shortcuts are not always useful. Allow yourself more time before making evaluations, get to know the nature of the context around you. It might be very useful.
