Comparison Is The Enemy of Joy

There are many things I do that I really shouldn’t. To some extent, it’s normal to be caught up in vices - it’s the reason the city of Las Vegas even exists.

However, I also believe it needs to be said that not all of these vices are healthy to engage in. One of them is related to a term that’s become quite commonplace in the age of the Internet. To be sure, social media has significantly popularized any term that consists of an abbreviation, but FOMO is especially potent.

FOMO, an acronym for Fear Of Missing Out, is very often exacerbated by seeing someone on a social platform, particularly a figure you may look up to, doing something you wish you could be doing as well.

I’ll give an example. As of the time of writing this, I’d just finished a wonderful morning of skiing with my father. We’d each enjoyed a bowl of the most delicious ramen I’ve ever had outside of Japan. And I mean it - that stuff tastes like it was made with fresh ingredients, not the packaged shit loaded with sodium that is so often seen in the States. 

However, once I had the chance to check Discord again on my phone, I opened said app. And that’s when the pang of FOMO hit me right between the eyes.

A friend of mine, whose username I will not print here (and whose real name I don’t know) had completed a very popular, and incredibly thought-provoking, fanfiction. They’d been working on it for several years (several meaning seven), and I couldn’t help but feel proud of them. 

Indeed, I was damn happy for them. If you’ve never worked on a long-term project like that, you can probably never appreciate just how rewarding it is to mark it as complete. To some extent, I don’t even know how it feels.

But the fact remains that besides being pleased, I also felt extremely jealous of this friend. I wish I could say that I’d been able to commit to a fanfiction like that and chisel away at it over a period of months to years. Indeed, I’ve abandoned more stories than I care to count, so to see someone hang up a trophy of having completed something that major…well, it certainly promotes FOMO.

Beyond the realm of fanfiction, FOMO can manifest in many other ways. As a terminally online young man, I spent more time on social media than, again, I care to admit. And it’s very common for me to see someone on vacation somewhere that I’d really like to visit, and that’s like a FOMO Factory.

The other aspect of FOMO that can be very toxic is when it makes me want to compare myself to others. Objectively speaking, I have a family that loves me (and I love them back). I’m in relatively good health, and I live in a decently affluent metropolitan area. I recently graduated magna cum laude from a moderately selective university, and I’m applying to graduate school to start this coming fall. From that standpoint, I should be a very happy person.

And yet, the Internet has ruined my mental health. Whenever I log onto Reddit, I constantly get bombarded by news that the sky is falling. Now, I’m not going to say everything is amazing - I don’t mean to be a Pollyanna, because it isn’t productive. 

After all, the second-largest city in one of the world’s most powerful countries is currently on fire. That same country recently elected a convicted felon who claims not to believe in climate change to be its President. Not only that, but the same convicted felon has been threatening to invade a country that’s long been allies with the United States. There are many other reasons Donald Trump should not have been elected, of course - the above is not an exhaustive list.

So no. Not everything is okay, and I think we need to be talking about how not okay the world is. That being said, spending 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, online is never good for anyone’s mental health, least of all mine. The line I should be a very happy person resonates with me today more than ever, as I fly home from my recent vacation in Colorado.

Speaking of comparison, let’s talk about Reddit. Every so often, there’s a post on the Pics subreddit about Australia’s third-largest airline, which is apparently the Royal Flying Doctors of Australia. The caption for that article is invariably that this “airline” has never charged a passenger throughout its nearly 100-year history. And invariably, this is meant as a dig at the United States, which famously does not have universal health insurance.

Australia’s Royal Flying Doctor Service treating a patient in a remote part of the country. Image taken from r/Pics.

Again, I’m not going to minimize the hell many people in this country go through as a result of the health insurance industry. It is a barbaric, for-profit system that deserves all the condemnation it gets online and in real life. The way many Redditors have reacted to the recent assassination of Brian Thompson at the hands of Luigi Mangione has only highlighted this system further.

A wise man once told me that comparison is the thief of joy. There are only two emotions it can result in. You might be smug if you believe you’re superior to someone else, or you might feel inadequate if you believe you’re inferior. 

Okay, I’ll admit it - that wise man is my father.

In all seriousness, one question that frequently comes up is this: If Americans are all so upset at the lack of universal health insurance, why aren’t there any mass protests? Those who have never lived in the United States probably don’t understand why we haven’t burned the whole country to the ground over this issue, and truth be told, sometimes I don’t either.

That being said, I live in Massachusetts, which is by any objective standard a pretty good place to live. At least, for now. On the Human Development Index, Massachusetts would be tied for fourth place with Hong Kong as of 2022. Only Switzerland, Norway, and Iceland are considered more “developed” than Massachusetts by this metric. Maybe I should identify more with my state than my country.

But let’s get back to the point. I constantly wish I lived in a country I could be proud to call myself part of. National pride is not the only thing that matters in life, of course, and by the standards of most people throughout human history, I have it good. It’s mostly the Internet that has convinced me otherwise.

For now, I have my family. I might still have a bright future even if my country doesn’t. But I’m just sick of constantly being made fun of online and feeling responsible for the hell Donald Trump is about to unleash.

Those two facts will go to war at some point, and I know which side I’d rather see emerge victorious.