Constant comparison

I recently completed a half-marthon with, by most standards, a respectable time of 1:34:46. It puts me in the top 10% of finishers and top 5% of all starters. One should feel good about themselves after something like this, right?

I, and I suspect I’m not alone in this, am not. And why? Because as soon as I know that I’ve completed the run and achieved my target time, I start looking around.

I wonder what my colleague run at? That elite practitioner I know of, what time did he finish at? The pregnant woman that seemed to finish around the same time as me, was I faster? ¹

And its such an utterly, completely dumb thing to do. Why is it so hard to be satisfied with an achievement that is both objectively good, and a goal you have set yourself?

I think it is at least in part due to low self-esteem, in combination with self-loathing. With a low self-esteem it is hard to see the value in your own accomplishments. Self-loathing gives you supernatural abilities to take any success and twist it into a failure.

There will always be someone better than you. You can never be satisfied as long as you compare yourself with others. And its infinite fuel for low self-esteem and self-loathing.