Happy with what you have

Being happy with what you have should be the easiest thing in the world, and it is one of the hardest, because there is always a better version of it just around the corner, waiting to make yours feel small.

Picture the schoolyard. You finally got the thing you wanted, and it is perfect, until Jerry shows up with the same thing, one model better. Damn Jerry. In an instant yours is worthless and you would trade it for his. It reads like a kid’s story, but watch how exactly it repeats in adult life, because we are mostly just taller children. You get the new phone, someone gets the better one. You buy the car you were thrilled about, a colleague buys the pricier one you could not justify, and suddenly the car you loved feels like a downgrade you settled for.

We are perfectly content with what we have, right up until something better is placed beside it. Then contentment evaporates. And the trap underneath is comparison. We measure everything against someone else, and the measuring is what does the damage.

This is not new. Our parents and grandparents compared themselves to the neighbors, the family, the people at work. The difference now is the scale. We are not up against the few people on our street, we are up against the entire internet. Do something, then open a feed, and there it is, better, always better. Better photographers, better careers, better holidays, better bodies, better lives. It has never been so easy to feel like you do not have enough, and from there, like you are not enough. Not fit enough, rich enough, far enough along.

So comparison is one of the oldest roots of human unhappiness, and we have built a machine that pipes it to us all day.

The cure sounds too simple to work. Stop comparing. It lives entirely in your head, in your perception and your ego, which means it is yours to change, even if changing it is the work of a lifetime rather than one article. Awareness is the first step. Next time you catch yourself measuring your life against someone else’s highlight reel, let it go and look back at your own. There will always be a better. Chase it and you sign up for a life of quiet dissatisfaction. Learn to be content with what is actually in your hands, and you carry your happiness with you instead of always renting it from the next purchase.

This is not new wisdom either. Almost two thousand years ago the Stoics were already writing the manual for exactly this. Worth a read.