This is The Nooner, a short daily (Monday - Saturday) newsletter slash podcast that has its very own section within Dispatches from Inner Space.
Every Sunday, I publish the Dispatches Weekly Digest (DWD), which lets you binge all the Nooners from the previous week. It also includes a meaningful song recommendation, and a short segment I call TMI, where I go off script to bring you backstage, so to speak.
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Solving comparisons with math
Alright everyone, let’s talk about comparisons again.
It’s honestly one of my favorite topics, because we can’t help ourselves. We are incorrigibly hierarchical creatures, no better than, as the other Jordan Petersen famously explained, lobsters.
Thankfully, we’re a hell of a lot smarter than lobsters, so if we really think about it, we can cut through the choking fog of our crustaceous DNA, and transcend the stupid comparisons.
One way to do this, is with math.
Stay with me!
Think about an axis along which you are tempted to make a comparison, or, in other words, some metric you might use to evaluate one human being against another.
How about...conventional standards of beauty.
Objectively, some people are hotter than others. Don’t argue this, it’s beneath you. We all know it. It’s uncomfortable to admit, but there is a spectrum (an axis, if you will) along which people generally fall in terms of how many other people find them attractive. Otherwise there wouldn’t be such a thing as Instagram filters mmkay.
But comparisons are bad! Right?
Sure. And yet this axis does exist. You have to be pretty delusional or disingenuous to deny it. And the very fact of its existence, and practically everyone’s innate ability to see it, invites us to line people up along it and treat them accordingly. Which, yes, is obviously bad.
So what can we do?
Well I’ll tell you what we can do, we can introduce another axis. Because while we can and should all agree that there is such a thing as a hotness axis, we can and should also all agree that human beings cannot be entirely reduced to this one axis.
Because of course there’s also a money axis.
Gratefully, this one is way easier for us to quantify. Everyone’s got net worth. What’s yours? I bet it’s higher than mine.
Perhaps you can see where this is going.
If you find yourself evaluating yourself or anyone else along the hotness axis, then you might as well evaluate them along the money one, too.
Unfortunately, there are people who are both much hotter and much richer than you, as well as people who are uglier and poorer than you.
Great, we’re back to where we started.
Well, not quite.
We forgot about the smartness axis.
Are there people who are hotter, richer, and smarter than you?
Hm. Probably.
But with three axes, it’s getting a lot harder to do these comparisons, isn’t it? If we were forced to line up even ten people in a ranked hierarchy of value based on only those three axes, we’d probably argue till the end of time about how exactly to arrange them. Given enough time, you might be able to personally settle on an arrangement in your own mind. For about five minutes, until you changed your mind for some reason.
And that’s just three axes. Granted, those are the ones that we tend to care and talk and obsess a lot about, but we also know those three axes don’t even come close to comprehensively representing us.
I said this is about math because the trend here is obvious to anyone who’s done any higher level algebra, or calculus. An axis is a visual representation of a variable, and we know that the more variables you introduce into an equation, the harder that equation is to solve, to the point of becoming literally impossible.
So, the final question here is this: How many axes (or variables) would you need to comprehensively represent a human being?
And the answer is...no one knows. But what we do know, is that it’s a hell of a lot more than three.
Which means that in order to meaningfully compare one human being to another, you’d have to solve an equation with too many variables to be solvable.
In short, it is meaningless to compare people along only one axis, and impossible along all of them together.
Now that we can see the truth, will we stop trying to compare ourselves to everyone along any single, oversimplified axis? Of course not. We’re lobsters, after all.
But what we can do, what we must do, is answer our inevitable impulse of comparison with more sophisticated responses.
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