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If you compare yourself to others in your pursuits you, simply put, cannot live happily.

Because if you constantly focus on the comparison trap, you’ll be so focused on getting better than others you’ll lose track of what it really means to better yourself.

There’s a quote by Marcus Aurelius that seems relevant to the point I’m trying to make and here it is:

“A better wrestler. But not a better citizen, a better person, a better resource in tight places, a better forgiver of faults.”

You see most of us try to be better than other people in many areas of our lives.

Maybe that’s by having more money, better cars, having more muscular bodies, better style, you get it.

Many of us try to one up each other in many of these hollow areas.

We shouldn’t be focusing on earning more money than so and so, or having the best house out of everyone.

We should instead focus on being the best people we can be, better people, better citizens.

And if we do we might become modern day saints.

And to me that’s the ultimate goal of life.

To become a saint.

Not to be the guy with the most houses or the most cars, because ultimately they don’t make me a better person.

Having too much money can actually cause you bigger problems.

For example the richest man in Ancient Rome Seneca regularly practiced being in poverty.

He did this because he knew that he had so much money the downside was huge.

Because he could lose it all.

So he practiced poverty so that if the worse case happened to him it wouldn’t effect him, because he’d already prepared for the worst.

Even though Seneca was wealthy he knew it didn’t make him a better person so he and all the other stoics focused on one thing above all.

Being people of virtue.

With the common good in mind above all.

You cannot live happily by comparing yourself to others, but what you can do is be the best person you can, the person god intended you to be. Comparing yourself to others only makes this harder.