Someone else’s scale

Society is happy to measure freedom by the number of deeds done, trips taken, victories won and prohibitions broken. But freedom includes the right to act — and the right not to.

Sometimes a person does something only to prove his independence: argues with his parents, breaks a rule, turns down a useful offer or picks the risky route so that nobody thinks he is being managed.

Someone else’s expectation still determines the choice — just with the sign reversed.

A free decision doesn’t have to be original. You can agree with the majority, follow advice, keep a tradition or take the safe option, if after checking it really does suit you.

A useful question:

Would I choose this if nobody ever found out whether I obeyed or rebelled?

Independence doesn’t require a constant demonstration that there is no leash. Sometimes the freest action looks surprisingly ordinary.

Freedom disappears especially fast when someone else’s action becomes a justification or a compulsory model for your own.

Someone else’s success is not an order to repeat his route either. One man left university early and built a company. Thousands of others left early and simply stopped studying. The biographies of winners are poor at showing the graveyard of similar decisions.

Comparison is useful when it helps you find a reference point:

• what level is possible;
• which skills are developed;
• what the other person does differently;
• what conditions helped him;
• which of it transfers.

Comparison turns harmful when someone else’s result is used as a measure of your own worth or as an excuse for an action.

The other person may have had different resources, taken a different risk, made a mistake, acted on his own values, paid a price we don’t see, or simply been luckier.

Responsibility for an action stays with whoever chooses it. “He did it too” may explain an influence, but it doesn’t cancel a decision.

And the reverse: someone else’s mistake doesn’t prove that our similar choice is wrong. Conditions can differ.

People inevitably compare themselves with others. Demanding that they never do so is about as practical as advising them not to notice the weather. What matters is choosing a comparison that yields information rather than just producing superiority or shame.

Competition grows easily out of comparison, though its rules, its prize and its price may have been chosen by someone other than us.

Once you start comparing salaries, marks, followers, speed, job titles or square metres, winning starts to feel important regardless of why any of it began.

But the rules of a competition are usually somebody’s choice. They may measure exactly what the organiser is good at, what he can sell, or what is convenient to count.

Before entering, it is worth asking:

• do I want the prize;
• do I accept the rules;
• is the price justified;
• what will taking part teach me;
• what happens if I lose;
• is the race distracting me from my own goal.

Refusing to compete doesn’t guarantee a win. It simply cancels one particular league table.

Sometimes you have to take part anyway: an exam, a competition, the labour market, a sports match. Then losing reports a result within that system and under those rules. It is not a universal verdict on a person.

You can be a bad player at a game you never chose. That may still have practical consequences, but it doesn’t have to become a personal philosophy.

You can usually see someone’s scale from what he mentions first on meeting you. One states his job title, another the make of his car, a third how many years it has been since his last holiday. Each is already competing and knows exactly where he stands in the table. The problem isn’t the table but the fact that nobody chose it: it came with the profession, the family or the neighbourhood. Its rules are written around somebody else’s strengths, and the prize was set by a person who doesn’t compete in it himself.

Getting out of a scale is harder than climbing it. Everyone in it approves of the climb; nobody approves of the exit, which from the outside is indistinguishable from a defeat conceded in advance.