Comparison is the thief of joy.

It's almost impossible to feel content. With the highlights of someone's life constantly across our screens, from unboxings on Instagram, a day in the life on TikTok and the career achievements on LinkedIn, we cannot escape someone else's success pushed down our throats. The moment we appreciate one of our own achievements, work, home, gym, there's always someone who has got one greater, fought through adversity harder, or just made it look that much better.

It begins innocently enough, a passing comparison, a scroll through someone else’s milestones, a subtle sense that we should be further along. But before long, we start living life as a series of checkpoints: the promotion, the partner, the apartment upgrade, the next destination. We keep chasing an image of “better,” rarely stopping to question whether we even want the life we’re running toward, or whether we’ve simply been conditioned to always want more.

Ambition used to mean doing something meaningful. Now, it’s often tangled with becoming someone visible. Progress has turned into performance, we think about people's reactions before we've even achieved our goal, then we curate, refine, and of course post all the good things. Never the bad, the battle, the struggle, unless it's of course, impressive. We scroll through other people’s milestones and wonder why ours feel less. Even when things are great, we still feel like they’re not quite enough.

Ambition without awareness quietly erodes contentment. When we’re constantly focused on others or what’s next, we forget to notice that we're already living our previous dreams. There is no final destination, no final result that gives us completion. The version of life we’re chasing, the one that feels like it will finally unlock peace, will still come with its own problems, pressures, and imperfections. Millionaires still have problems. We’ll still wake up some days feeling uncertain. We’ll still have times where doubt ourselves. We’ll still want to keep moving forward. The destination will look different, but the restlessness will be the same, unless we learn how to make peace with where we are now, enjoy the journey that we're on and accept that whilst it's always good to dream, gratitude of our current situation will always feel better than waiting for the next.

It's almost impossible to feel content. Unless we decide to.

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