“Comparison is the thief of all happiness,” says former NFL star Joe Ehrmann in denouncing the pressures on boys to “be a man,” in the documentary The Mask You Live In.* Messages overt and covert, from video games, fathers and peers, leave males of all ages struggling with loneliness and fury. Similar pressures weigh on females. Comparing ourselves to others can haunt and hurt us all.

But there’s a catch: Comparison is a source of pleasure as well as pain. In How the Mind Works, psychologist Stephen Pinker concurs with the popular wisdom that “people are happy when they feel better off than their neighbors, unhappy when they feel worse off.” His example: “You open your paycheck and are delighted to find you have been given a five percent raise—until you learn that your co-workers have been given a ten percent raise.” Happiness may last no longer than the tingle of the flattering comparison that brought it on.

Still, people take happiness for granted as their goal in life. It is a condition they hope to pursue, find, and remain in, as if it were a job or a house. “I just want to be happy.”  Even those pursuing the contemplative life, the life of prayer or meditation or asceticism, may describe it as their path to  “true happiness.”

But maybe there is a reason why happiness shines out as such an inviting yet elusive star. Evolutionists point out that for any organism, many more things can go dangerously wrong than can go blissfully right. Pinker: “There are twice as many negative emotions (fear, grief, anxiety, and so on) as positive ones, and losses are more keenly felt than equivalent gains….[P]eople’s mood plummets more when imagining a loss in their lives…than it rises when imagining an equivalent gain….[H]appiness tracks the effect of resources on biological fitness. As things get better, increases in fitness show diminishing returns: more food is better, but only up to a point. But as things get worse, decreases in fitness can take you out of the game: not enough food, and you’re dead” (392).

So it is not that happiness eludes us solely because comparisons steal it or we are incapable of finding it. It is that we come into life in the first place equipped with alarm bells for all its gritty dangers but with joys that are less urgent and often fleeting. We might feel less driven about happiness if a bit of the evolutionists’ long view rubbed off on us.

 

* Teddy Roosevelt is credited with the original version: “Comparison is the thief of joy.”