By Nathan Hart
At some point during my Middle School years, I remember suddenly becoming very aware of the differences between myself and my classmates. In particular, I noticed material things like physical attractiveness and whether my friends’ parents had more or less money than my parents did. As a young child, these factors hadn’t really crossed my mind very much. But in adolescence, a switch turned on somewhere in my consciousness, and a constant comparison game arose to the top of my mind. When my friend Danny got three pairs of Umbro soccer shorts but my mom said we could only afford one pair for me, I thought about it a lot.
My experience is not unique. In the 1950s, A social psychologist named Leon Festinger developed the now widely accepted Social Comparison Theory. The theory suggests two things: 1) human beings have an inherent tendency to assess our own opinions, abilities, and attributes, and 2) instead of evaluating those things against an absolute ideal, we simply compare them with the people we see around us. According to Festinger, we feel a little better about ourselves if we determine that our own stuff is better than someone else’s, and we feel worse if we determine the opposite.
When Dr. Festinger conducted his research seventy years ago, he observed that the number of acquaintances with whom a person compared himself or herself was a few dozen at most. Now, by logging onto our social media accounts, our number of comparable acquaintances can rise into the thousands. This can lead to personal despair because the images we see on Instagram are taken at the best moments of someone’s day. For instance, I might be sitting in my living room, frustrated and within earshot of my own bickering children, while I scroll through your social media feed only to view a curated collection of images from your most recent vacation depicting your children seemingly behaving perfectly and looking beautiful. “Why can’t my life be as good as theirs?” I might wonder. In that moment, if Dr. Festinger is right, I’ll feel pretty miserable about myself, at least until the next time I have a beautiful image of my children that I can upload to my accounts.
I call this cycle “compare and despair.” Once you’re aware of it, you’ll notice it everywhere in our society and possibly in your own life.
Compare and despair didn’t start with the recent rise of social media and it didn’t start in the 1950s with Festinger’s research. It’s an inherent part of human nature and stretches back to the earliest records of humanity. For example, a man named Asaph lived in Bible times. Asaph was a music director in the Temple in Jerusalem around the time of King Solomon. We know about Asaph because he wrote several psalms that are in the Bible to this day. One of them, Psalm 73, is an honest prayer in which Asaph compares and despairs before finding the best remedy for that terrible cycle. In the first part of the psalm, Asaph laments “the prosperity of the wicked.”
These are people that Asaph noticed who were living materially blessed lives even though they didn’t seem to deserve it. Think Bernie Madoff on a yacht. (Have you ever resented someone’s wealth or beauty as you viewed their Instagram profile? Be honest.) By comparison, Asaph felt that he had far fewer blessings even though he righteously “washed his hands in innocence.” The wicked, on the other hand, wore “pride as their necklace.” Even though they were undeserving, he noticed this about them: “always at ease, they increase in riches.” It’s as if Asaph opened his Instagram app and saw some friends on vacation enjoying a perfect life while he himself stayed at home slaving away with good deeds, “all in vain.” Poor Asaph.
So how did Asaph find contentment in a world of comparison? Simply, he remembered where to go when his soul was troubled. Like going to the car wash when your windshield is dirty, going to church cleansed his soul and cleared his perspective so he could see clearly again. Halfway through the psalm, Asaph “enters the sanctuary of God.” After that phrase, the tone of the psalm and the posture of his heart completely shifts: contentment replaces comparison.
In the sanctuary, Asaph recalls some wonderful things that God has provided for him, for example, “You hold my right hand; you guide me with your counsel,” and realizes that God is the truly incomparable gift, freely given to us. If we have God, we don’t need anything else that our friends seem to have. “Whom have I in heaven but you?” Asaph asks, “And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you.” Here, Asaph invites us to look at the beauty and delight of having closeness with God, then he invites us to look at the whole world and everything in it, and ask ourselves, Is there anything there that compares to God’s worth? No, there is nothing on earth that compares to the preciousness and supreme beauty of God. When we make that comparison, we do not despair. We rejoice. If we have God, we have everything we need.
From this vantage point we are reminded of who God really is, and who we really are as well. In the presence of God, Asaph no longer resents the apparently perfect enjoyments of his wicked friends’ lives. He now sees that their “feet are on slippery places,” meaning that under the surface, they might be far less spiritually secure than their profile pictures suggest. As for how he views himself, Asaph now realizes that “when his soul was embittered,” he was being “ignorant” and acting “like a beast.” Whereas previously he was looking down in judgment on “the wicked” and viewing himself quite highly (“righteous”), now he feels sympathy for others and is honest about his own brutish behavior.
Want to stop comparing and despairing? Enter the sanctuary. Worship God. Sing praises, get close to God. In doing so, we discover that there’s “nothing on earth” that compares to God’s infinite worth. True contentment cannot be found in the perfect Instagram picture, but in the presence of our most beautiful Creator.
