A short YouTube video by Jacqueline Elliott arguing that constantly comparing yourself to others—especially idealized people seen online or perceived “top” individuals—undermines happiness. The speaker distinguishes productive comparison (learning from others) from toxic comparison (envy, criticism, excuse-making) and urges focusing on incremental self-improvement (getting 1% better each day) rather than criticizing or envying others.
Chapters
You compare yourself to people all the time. And also, I mean, there's a good comparing and a bad comparing, but sometimes you look at the top guy and instead of trying to learn from him, you're looking at why he's such a prick or a show off or all the defects that this person might have because you don't want to be anything like them. But it's seriously, like, it's, it's more mostly like envy. Like you really should be close to that person so you can try to be better. But the thing is, we try to compare ourselves to different relationships. We try to compare ourselves to different people and we almost like look at them like they're out of, they're out of our league. They're out of, they did something or they have like some magic, like their spoon and they were fed a certain way and you're just like, try to criticize them. And we're not able to like put in that work to try to get that way. Or we're maybe looking at people on Facebook, Instagram, and all these people that look like they're happy when they're really not happy, they're living a fake life. We compare ourselves to different people. And you don't look at yourself and try to grow 1% better every day. You're always looking for excuses, excuses of why you shouldn't change.