Don't Compare

Oct, 25 2025

The Painful Middle

The world is filled with achievements. There are great podcasts about them, stories of promotions, getting investors' checks, and cracking every single problem in your early 20s. A few are able to do that, and it leaves the majority of people with an immense amount of pressure to have done something specifically in late teens to early 20s. Everyone talks about success and achievements, but no one talks about the process. We have the hunger to reach there but how? We don't know that.

Creating something meaningful and impactful in life is just so overwhelming sometimes.

You're trying to create something. Amazing!! The starting feels so refreshing and romantic, but the pain is in the middle. You find yourself searching for materials and resources. You switch between tasks, and suddenly you're exploring something completely new. This exploration is exhausting, and your brain starts to hurt actually not by doing hard work but drained by wandering into the unknown and not seeing anything in front of you at the end of the day.

You feel overwhelmed, dumb, insecure, and doubtful. The bigger picture of why you're doing what you're doing becomes a blur. That blur is so dry, and you feel lost. The next few hours of working on anything feels numb, and the charm is gone. At that point, you feel like you need a holiday, or just a break for your mind. While you're trying to figure out something, there are people's life updates laying into your stories and status to show you you're missing out on something. Your brain doesn't understand the reality easily; it just gets into the flow. Is doing these things really worth it? Should I do a job? Travel more? Click pictures more? Hang out with your friends because the scream from within your young age will never come back again, live fully.

What exactly is the meaning of living? No, tell yourself what is it? Sitting with people, talking, enjoying, having company and not living the lonely life that most of us as humans scare a lot from. Still, you have a vision and mission. You reached the phase where you enjoy your work, or even not enjoying, you're still doing it. Because the hunger never lets you sit quiet.

Creation is a cure for everything, but what if creating something new isn't easy or readymade? What if you aren't blessed with talent from the start? For the normal, average person, creation is so hard. Every knowledge gap makes you feel like you don't know a thing in life.

But what is the reason for this?

The Illusion of the High Point

What are we even doing now? Social media and half known success stories and the romanticization of hustle culture has done an immense amount of damage to us. We feel life needs to be lived from one high point to another.

Being alone feels lonely. Spending time doing something less tempting than what we see others doing gives us immense pain within. That pain has robbed us of the idea of our core functionality. We, as humans, have to do some work and keep living with it without looking at others and comparing with them in altogether different lives and circumstances. In the modern world, through the access of internet, we can see the open world from one north pole to the other south pole. Doesn't make everything same for all.

This world was designed by people. How fantastic this is! We, as humans, created a living world for ourselves. From the start, we were hunter-gatherers; everyone around us was hunting and living in a cave because that's what we had for surviving. Civilization started to get shaped by the agricultural revolution. We began to build societies, homes, and all our necessary things to live an easy life, making every needed accessibility around us.

In the 1700s, people started to read and write a lot. By the end of the 1800s, the world was filled with great literature, great work in philosophies, like Hegel and Dostoevsky.

As we always talk about, the more complex things get, the harder they become to manage. Complexities give birth to a lot of problems. Then, some radical thinkers questioned a few things that every other person looked at as normal. They questioned few things, made a change, made that thing a life's work, and society got reshaped again, and it got iterated from centuries. There is always work we keep doing from generations; it keeps evolving with time, but at the end of the day, we are just living like before but with more accessibility and luxuries than before.

The time when everyone was farming. Then the great industrial revolution started, and people worked around that. Tech innovation took shape. In the early 2000s, the rise of the white-collar job was introduced. most of around us is now a tech worker. AI is taking its place. The whole world is revolving around AI. And in every space and timeline, we are suffering from the same feelings that someone else is doing something better and they have a better life than us. We are the first animal that suffers from our own imaginations.

The Rabbit Hole of Identity

Be really, really realistic with yourself: consider your unique circumstances of how you were raised and born. Creating your life's work is indeed hard, harder than you can think and time taking. And that's the whole point to have something to look for, to care and do regardless of every unfair thing. That's the journey, not the destination.

Getting into the rabbit hole of finding identity as a human, that topic in itself will be either vague or shallow at the basic level, so the attempt to write is.

The comparisons these people are doing this and that; why not me? Despite wanting to be like that great personality, at the core, what stopped you from becoming the one?

Success comes from a lot of knowledge and wisdom in the particular field you want to make a difference in. You do that thing and get every reward the modern world has created, rewards designed to make those people superior to their fellow humans. Their lives become far more happier, luxurious, luckier, and better. If one person reaches there and shows that life to other people, a mass amount of people will wish to get there, and that creates differences between people. But from where does this difference truly start?

The Structural Divide

Ability to Learn: The capacity to acquire a knowledge base more quickly and sharply than other people. You get ahead of them, use those insights as a tool for your creation, and reach success. Exceptional people like Steve Jobs.
Birth Circumstance: Being born into rich families where you don't have to think about basic human needs like food on the table, clothes, or shelter. These people avoid being trapped in the survival instinct, like some philosophers, who question everything but ultimately sleep on soft mattresses and have good food prepared by someone else. This privilege insulates them.
Geography/Safety Net: Being born into a very progressed country like the U.S. or Europe, where the government safety net is so strong that you don't have to prioritize a job over curiosity and creation (like Linus Torvalds). Contrast this with being born in a country like India, where the pressure of jobs hits you by age 20, eating away at your desire to create art. That's what we call "when real life hits you." You have to make sacrifices. Is this a universal human condition, or specific to geographic areas on Earth?
Easy Accessibility: Coming from a developing country but into a wealthy family. They don't actually have to go the extra mile; whenever they'll be ready, the world will be open for them and one call away, as someone in their bloodline already went through that.
The Double Stigmax: Growing up in a developing country and a poor household, living in the struggle of poverty and, worse, the stigma of being a woman. For some, the world hasn't changed. The pressure of marriage, the lack of basic human freedom, and the difficulty of questioning everything you were taught as a child feels haunting. You lived for almost 20 years with a certain bias, and then in half a decade, life unfolds, forcing you to question your identity. Your inner soul desperately wishes you were born into different circumstances, making the concept of life and living less difficult.

Once you understand the calculation of few things that's really necessary to make at a certain point in your life, that day the whole perception you made about yourself gets reshaped. You start to see yourself and others with empathy. It'll automatically make you less judgmental, more humble and grounded. We see these things, keep believing it for a longer period of time, then as we grow up, start to question few things, and turning bias to unbiased makes everything a lot easier. Everything starts to get curated and helps you to set realistic expectations from yourself.

The Cost of Relearning

This constant learning, unlearning, and relearning exhausts you so badly that you can't easily dare to see the bigger picture. Tell me, where did you actually see anyone around you achieve that? Nowhere, right?

The journey is daunting for anyone. Imagine a person coming from this background with no intellectual or emotional support. No one will believe in them. The struggle for survival is so strongly ingrained that not having a job and wanting to explore things is considered a failure in itself.

The statement most frequently directed at girls and women is, "You're the lucky one. You got a chance to study; otherwise, all the other girls your age got married and are having children." Trust me, this is true and uncomfortable. I can't tell you the hollowness I felt in my stomach hearing these statements. It made me want to hide from humanity, close myself off, and enter a zone of peace and creation. I crave the feeling people must have felt when they were writing, painting, or creating something beautiful, and no one was questioning why they weren't doing a job.

Life can never be the same for anyone. Maybe somewhere far from our eyes, someone is pushing their limits to get to where others easily land. No jealousy, no more hate for anything. This is life. Everyone got a different start, and you need to change your lenses and stop comparing. It's your moral duty to make the life you want to live.

There is equality in humanity, no matter where you came from or what you did to get here. When you witness the inner responsibility to keep that human alive with your work, you are there already, beyond gender, inequality, rich, or poor. This world is open for everyone, but a few need to walk extra miles. And that's okay.

Never compare yourself to the people who were born in a first-world country and who got the access and privilege to think that loudly. The objective-driven world made you think this way. Objectives and comparison do come with a cost.

Then eventually, slowly, you start appreciating work really for the first time, not craving fame, respect, validation, or status. The only craving is to learn more. You seek the truths and try to be a learned one, not a powerful one.

You want to read the bulky novel without ever posting it somewhere. You'll love and be grateful for the privilege you got to spend the time on dreams rather than trying to fit in. You don't have to follow the row. You can keep wandering on your own without the fear of being lost somewhere because that journey is all you got, and for that, it's worth living the boring life. Embrace the boring work and keep doing that for a longer period of time.