Comparing yourself to others is good

My mom says that "the only person you should worry about is yourself." We will explore the validity of this statement by examining the opinion piece by Elite Daily titled: The Only Person You Should Worry About it Yourself.

According to Elite Daily, "you have to be a little selfish," worrying about yourself, because in the end, "no one really cares about you except yourself." If you turn the stakes dial to 10 you will realize this is the logic that makes suicide okay. No one cares about you so you can just stop (as they say).  The only reason people spend time with you is because they are insecure and trying to "keep in good graces with the people around them." I think there are other reasons - maybe they enjoy your company? Man. This article. My mom has never said no one really cares about you except yourself - just putting that out there.

Shockingly this is in the motivation section of Elite Daily. WTF?! It's not really motivating to learn that no one cares about you.

The article goes on to say that we spend our time and energy in people and reap no reward. No reward - Wow! What a misanthropic thing to say. They justify this idea by saying that worrying about others makes their problems our problems. So this is an important idea to think about though. I think you should be empathetic to the plight of others; but not so empathetic that you're carrying around their emotional baggage. How you balance that - I don't know.

"We constantly compare ourselves to other people  - yet that only make us feel worse about ourselves and discourages us." Comparing ourselves to other people is competition - and competition is a good thing! Competition leads to better outcomes, not worse. iPhones wouldn't be here had the Palm Treo not sucked. We wouldn't have sent a man to the moon without Soviet competition. The 4-minute mile was impossible to break until competition allowed us to realize it could be broken. Competition fuels improvement and encourages us to do more. If we didn't compete with other people humanity would suck.

I think this leads to a tangential discussion about whether it's okay to compare people. I think you have to or there would be no standards. Think about what would happen if teaches stopped comparing the work of students. There would be no standards - all students would receive A's for their work - regardless of how shitty it was. You have to compare yourself to others to improve. And to go on a wider tangent, this is why I hate abstract art - it has no standards.

This philosophy makes little sense to me. This article made no sense.