Don’t Base Your Happiness On Other People’s Lives

Another key point from Tim Hoch’s article in Thought Catalog, “10 Ways You’re Making Your Life Harder Than it Has to Be.”

The seventh point of the article is “you constantly compare your life to others.” Chances are, we’ve all had moments where we take a look at what other people have (money, jobs, success, relationships) and get green with envy. There have even been a lot of studies performed recently about the effect that social media has on a person’s overall happiness — seeing the highlights of other people’s lives can occasionally make us feel depressed, because we feel as though we have to compare what we have to what others have.

But there are many problems with this. For one, we need to realize that when we compare ourselves to others, we tend to idealize the lives that other people have, when in reality everyone has their own unique challenges and hardships that they face on a daily basis. “The grass is always greener on the other side.”

The biggest problem, though, is that the need to compare ourselves to others will never produce happiness. We cannot control the lives of other people, but we can control our own lives and, therefore, our own happiness. If there is something in our lives that we are unhappy with, we have the ability to change it.