I saw a meme today. At first, I loved it. Then I thought a little more deeply about it and reconsidered.
It said, “The happiest people I know are evaluating and improving themselves. The unhappy people are usually evaluating and judging others.”
At first, I said to myself, “Yeah…life should be all about improving yourself and not worrying about what other people are doing.” That makes sense, right? Keep your eyes on yourself, and let other people worry about themselves.
Then I realized that the meme is self-referential. It is doing the very thing that it says we should not be doing. It is evaluating and judging those who are evaluating and judging.
I do that too. It is really hard to get away from it. In the process of thinking about how we can or should grow, we are inevitably making comparisons to those we think of as in need of growth. Perhaps at some level it is in our nature to attempt to be better than those around us, and this kind of statement seems to allow for just such a thing.
The trick seems to be to keep our eyes on ourselves and to allow others to be who they are, for better or for worse. Becoming “better” doesn’t make you “better than them,” and someone not working on becoming “better” doesn’t make them “worse than me.”
So…I’m reworking this meme (at least here if not as an actual meme) to say, “The happiest people I know are evaluating and improving themselves and not worried in the least about whether anyone else is doing the same.”
