Measuring Up

According to some very academic studies that I heard of at some point, most of us think we are better or would be better than most other people. At most everything. Like driving, exercising, working, ethics, community involvement, friendship.

I know I'm slightly shorter than the average person, so I can't say that I'm better than most at being tall.

I know my SAT scores are better than the average person because College Board said so.

However, my doctor and the College Board seem to be the only cases where I am provided with hard statistics on how I stack up percentile-wise in my physical height or alleged mental capacity.

I don't really like this whole idea though of measuring against the populus. I don't want to be better than everyone else because people don't like bragging and there would be no such thing as friendly competition - I would always win. What really matters though is readjusting our framework to focus on being better versions of ourselves. Competing who we are with who we'd like to be. And not who we'd like to be as in I'd like to be Megan Fox but who we'd like to be as in I'd like to be a better me.

Learning to compare and contrast is a valuable skill that I learned in a 4th grade venn diagram. We shouldn't be venndiagraming ourselves against one another. It's dumb. Everyone is 96% the same as a monkey, DNA-wise, so we must be an awful lot closer than that to one another. We're fighting over fragments of DNA. Can I honestly say my nucleotides are sexier, smarter, faster, stronger than someone elses? Maybe if I had a PhD in genetic translation, but I don't.

Especially in a society so focused on individualizing everyone, it's amazing how we try to measure up to one another constantly.

Megan Fox has 8 or 9 tattoos. I'm so far behind. Good thing I'm not trying to catch up, only to my expectations for myself. They're pretty damn high, but they don't involve needle and ink.

It's time to measure up to no one other than myself.