I woke up this morning in a comparative mode. Something I saw on social media was a bit triggering, I’ll be honest to admit, and I found myself starting to go down that familiar rabbit hole I try my best to avoid – of looking at another person’s life and thinking about what they have that I wish I had, or what seems different or better in their life than in mine.
And I knew immediately that this wasn’t going to lead anywhere good, helpful or productive. I also know, from both my training as a therapist and from 20 years of coaching thousands of people, that comparison like this is almost always profoundly skewed. We’re looking through one very narrow lens, focusing on one particular dimension of someone else’s life and essentially saying, “I wish I had that.”
That can actually be important and helpful information if we integrate it in a way that helps us understand ourselves a bit better, or shines a light on something we genuinely want more of and perhaps can act on. But so often in comparison mode, our view of ourselves and others contracts down to a tiny pinhole.
We’re not seeing the totality of their life, or ours. When we compare ourselves to others, we’re often seeing what’s on the outside, including a polished, “for public consumption” version of their lives or a particular moment in time, not what’s truly happening or what their internal experience may be. At the same time, we’re often failing to see the full reality and richness of our own lives.
So I had an idea. I asked the AI chat tool I use, which I’ve trained rather extensively over time about my work, life, interests, values and what matters most to me, to tell me what I might not be seeing about myself and my life.
I asked it to identify the things in my life that I could genuinely be grateful for, and I was really surprised by what happened. It came back with close to 200 situations, experiences and realities. Some might appear to others as “small” things, but to me, each one represented something true and meaningful about my life. Reading through that list was deeply eye-opening and healing.
But as I went through it, I realized it was missing some key categories of my life and experience that my chat tool hadn’t been informed of. So I told it more about the experiences, relationships and aspects of my life, work, family and more that have brought me great joy, meaning, connection and fulfillment. And we kept building the list.
In the end, there were more than 300 aspects, dimensions and experiences in my life that I feel genuinely and deeply grateful for. And I can tell you this: I’m keeping that list handy, and I’m going to look at it regularly and update it as often as I can.
This experience helped me shift right then and there, not because every single thing in my life is perfect. It certainly isn’t, and not because there aren’t things I deeply wish were different. There are. Nor does this exercise mean that comparison with others can never give us useful information. Sometimes it can reveal what we would like more of, what we’re aspiring to, what we’re dreaming about or what we may want to change or create for ourselves.
What shifted for me today was the lens.
Comparison narrows the lens dramatically
When we compare ourselves to someone else, we tend to isolate one dimension of their life and then build assumptions around many others based on what they’re sharing on social media or “showing” us in other ways. We can take one piece of information and unconsciously turn it into a much bigger conclusion: “They have something important that I don’t.” From there, it can be a very short trip to “Their life is better than mine,” or even “I’ve failed in a big way.”
But those conclusions are profoundly one-sided. We don’t know the private struggles another person is facing. We don’t know what they worry about at 3 a.m., what hurts, what they’ve lost, what they’re afraid of, what feels missing to them or what they may be looking at in our lives and wishing they had themselves. We know only what they’re comfortable revealing.
And perhaps even more importantly, when we become intensely focused on what someone else has, we often stop seeing what we have.
The red car syndrome
There’s also a phenomenon sometimes referred to as the “red car syndrome,” or the frequency illusion. Once something captures our attention, we suddenly start noticing it everywhere.
My son experienced this recently after an amazing trip he took to Madrid. Before his trip, Madrid wasn’t particularly prominent in his awareness. But afterward, suddenly Madrid seemed to be everywhere, in conversations, articles, social media, the news and travel references. I even started noticing it more myself. The world hadn’t suddenly become more filled with Madrid references; our attention had simply become attuned to them.
I believe the same thing can happen with comparison, gratitude and so much more in our lives. Whatever we train our attention on, we begin to see more of. If we’re focused on what’s missing, seemingly unfair or different from what others have, we’ll find more evidence of that. But if we deliberately begin looking for what is meaningful, fortunate, beautiful, deeply valuable and gratitude-worthy in our own lives, those things become much more visible too.
Gratitude expands the field of vision again
That’s why this exercise was so powerful for me. It wasn’t simply “make a gratitude list.” I’ve done that hundreds of times in my life, as many of us have. We’ve written down five things we’re grateful for, thought of three good things that happened that day or reminded ourselves to “count our blessings.” All of that can certainly be helpful.
But this felt different because of the sheer depth and breadth of it. When you identify 10 things you’re grateful for, you’ll probably name the obvious ones. When you get to 50, you have to look harder and the items become more nuanced. When you get to 100, you begin noticing things you rarely consciously think about.
And as the list keeps growing, something else starts happening. You begin to see the architecture of your life.
You start recognizing experiences you’ve forgotten to appreciate and capabilities that have become so normal to you that you no longer recognize them as gifts. You see relationships, memories, interests, freedoms, choices, growth, resilience, lessons, opportunities and even difficult experiences that helped shape you into who you are today. And you begin to recognize how much of what you once wanted, hoped for, dreamed about or worked extraordinarily hard to achieve has quietly become part of your everyday life.
Everyday life has a funny way of making the extraordinary feel ordinary.
None of this erases our challenges or invalidates our longings. Two things can be true at the same time: something you deeply wish were different in your life can exist alongside hundreds of things that are meaningful, precious, joyful, fortunate and worthy of profound gratitude.
Holding both truths at once feels much more productive, expansive and enlivening to me.
And when our perspective shifts, we often show up differently too, with more energy, possibility and openness to taking positive, breakthrough action toward what we want.
Here’s the exercise I’d love for you to try
Go to the AI chat tool of your choice and ask it:
“Based on all that you know about me, can you identify at least 100 things in my life that I could genuinely be grateful for, including experiences, relationships, abilities, opportunities, personal growth, interests, accomplishments, freedoms, everyday pleasures, inner strengths and things that I may now be taking for granted?”
Then see where it takes you. If your AI tool knows you well, you may be surprised by how quickly the list grows beyond 100.
And if your AI tool doesn’t know you well enough to come up with a substantial list, don’t interpret that as meaning there’s less in your life to appreciate.
It simply means the tool needs more information. Train it by sharing more about yourself. Tell it what lights you up and brings you pride and joy. Share about the people you love, the work that has mattered to you, the things you’ve overcome, the places you’ve been, the activities that make you lose track of time, the things you value, the experiences that have shaped you and the positive moments in your life that you never want to forget.
Then ask again and keep going. You may find categories that the AI misses. I did. Add them yourself and push deeper.
And when you’re done, save the list somewhere you can return to it, especially on the days when you catch yourself going down that negative and painful comparison rabbit hole.
The goal isn’t really the number. It’s to keep looking long enough and deeply enough that you begin seeing your own life more richly and expansively.
My circumstances didn’t change between the moment I woke up this morning looking at social media and feeling comparative in a difficult way and the moment I finished this exercise. But my perspective did.
And sometimes, one meaningful shift in perspective can open the door to a true breakthrough.
