There is a particular kind of suffering that doesn’t announce itself. It dresses well. It laughs at the right moments. It congratulates others sincerely, almost convincingly. And then, in the privacy of one’s own mind, it measures. You smile at a friend’s promotion, but later replay your own stagnation like a wound that won’t clot. You scroll past weddings, glow-ups, spiritual awakenings, foreign trips and feel an unnamed shrinking inside, as if your life has been subtly misplaced. You don’t hate others. That would be easier. What hurts is that you question yourself in their reflection. The Bhagavad Gita never mocks this condition. It doesn’t shame the human mind for comparing. It simply dissects it, like a surgeon who knows that healing requires first seeing the rot. These are not shlokas for people who are loud in their envy. These are for people who are polite in their pain.

When the Mind Becomes a Courtroom, and You Are Both Accused and Judge

The silent suffering of comparison hidden behind functional smiles

One must elevate oneself by one’s own mind, not degrade oneself. The mind can be a friend or an enemy.

Comparison turns the mind into a courtroom that never adjourns. Evidence is always being presented, someone else’s success, someone else’s timing, someone else’s ease. And you sit there, cross-examining your own worth with brutal efficiency. The Gita makes a devastating observation here: the mind is not against you by nature. It simply reflects the role you’ve assigned it.

When comparison rules, the mind becomes an executioner that uses other people’s lives as weapons. It’s not that you want what they have. It’s that their having it makes you question whether you are late to your own life. The tragedy is not jealousy. The tragedy is self-abandonment.

The Illusion of the Shared Race: Running on Different Tracks While Staring Sideways

Better to fail in one’s own duty than to succeed in another’s.

Comparison assumes a shared finish line. The Gita quietly dismantles this assumption without drama. There is no common syllabus for human lives. No synchronized timetable. No universal milestone chart. Yet the modern soul lives like a student peeking into another’s answer sheet, terrified that the other person knows something you don’t.

This shloka is cruel in its honesty: even a “successful” life, if borrowed, will rot you from the inside. Because it requires living in constant translation, translating someone else’s desires into your own days. You feel behind not because you are slow, but because you are walking away from yourself while trying to keep pace with others.

The Hunger That Cannot Be Fed: Why Comparison Grows Even After Achievement

Measuring yourself against others erases your own path

Even the wise are carried away by the restless senses.

This is where the Gita becomes almost merciless. It says: even wisdom does not immunize you against comparison. Even insight trembles when exposed to constant stimulation. You think achievement will cure this hunger. It won’t. Because comparison does not arise from lack, it arises from misdirected attention. The senses are always scanning, always collecting data, always asking: Where do I stand?

Comparison is not about others being ahead. It is about the inability to sit alone with your own becoming. The mind that compares is a stomach that cannot digest silence. So it keeps eating images, timelines, benchmarks, until it becomes nauseous and calls it ambition.

Watching Without Bleeding: The Art of Seeing Without Measuring

One who sees others as oneself, in joy and sorrow, is considered the highest yogi.

This is not empathy as social performance. This is something far more difficult: to see another person’s rise without inserting your own worth into the equation. The Gita doesn’t say ignore others. It says equalize them within your perception. Not above you. Not below you. Just… human.

Comparison collapses when you realize this truth: another person’s life is not a verdict on yours. It is merely a different sentence written in a different ink. To look at others without bleeding internally is not detachment. It is maturity, the kind that comes only after you’ve mourned the versions of life you thought you were supposed to live.

The Day You Stop Competing With Ghosts

You have a right to action, not to the fruits.
This is the final release. Not resignation. Release. Comparison survives on imagined futures and borrowed outcomes. The Gita pulls you back into the only territory that was ever yours: action, effort, presence. You are not behind. You are not ahead. You are simply here. And here is enough, if you stop asking the world to grade you. One day, the smile you wear outside will no longer be a performance. It will be quiet. Uncomparative. Unobserved. And for the first time, the mind will stop keeping score because it finally understands it was never a competition, only a becoming.