Our wifi/phone contract is up for renewal next week and we’ve been scurrying around trying to decide should we stay or should we go? Most readers will be familiar with sites like GoCompare.com or Compare the Market.Com which provide relative prices for all sorts of products including insurance and various utilities. When budgets are strained it makes sense to see where you can make savings.
We’ve been comparing various aspects of the offers available and trying to decide whether it’s worth the effort involved in changing supplier only to find that the low prices offered to tempt us to sign up with them will rise in short order! Nobody measures the hassle potential alongside the reduction in prices. Not least because it is impossible to measure!
With all the unknowns, comparing utility prices is easy when you look at league tables for other things where differences are almost impossible to measure. For example, there are league tables for the performance of schools usually measured by exam successes without necessarily taking into account many other things which go to make a school a place where you think your children would be happy. Hospitals may be measured by the length of waiting lists without considering other less tangible aspects of the quality of care.
Whether it’s easy or not, making comparisons is a pretty basic human response. Whether we say it out loud or not, we seek to check out our value against the value of others! We want to see if we come out on top or near the top in all sorts of ways. It expresses a kind of survival instinct. Our friends are on holiday in the Maldives – why are we not going somewhere similarly exotic? People seem to have nicer houses, more friends, cleverer children, better health. You can bet your life that when illness or loss strikes some bright spark will suggest, ‘Thank yourself lucky you’re not like X. Have you heard? They are struggling with some much worse disease’. Or ‘Just be glad you do not live in Gaza’. Not very helpful if well meant!
Timing is significant. We remember a long time ago thinking that a particular family that we knew lived a kind of golden life. All were Intelligent, successful, healthy, good-looking people. Little did we know that in the space of little over a year three members of that family would be struck down by different illnesses, two of them in their prime.
Choice is important. It determines whether you come out of the comparison well or badly. A great deal of our happiness depends on what or who we choose to compare ourselves with and when we do it. We often tend to make our comparisons in line with a story about ourselves and our world that we are telling ourselves. And we tend to envy one part of someone else’s life without acknowledging that our view is partial. Or without recognising other parts which may be less attractive. None of us really know what other people are dealing with behind closed doors or what they will have to deal with at some time in the future. A preoccupation with comparisons can leave us adrift and a bit bewildered, resentful or envious. Ill-chosen comparisons can make for real discontent.
Telling people not to make comparisons would be a waste of time. And comparisons used wisely can be a means of self-knowledge - learning about our own longings and aspirations. The important thing is to develop our own taproot to a sense of value which does not depend on measuring ourselves against others.
It’s not at all easy. It’s a life’s work.
Photo: Catholic Voice
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