Learning That "comparison Is The Thief Of Joy" Has Done Wonders For My Play Enjoyment

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Sorry in advance for the length, but I want to provide some context. I don't do a lot of high-end content, but I did join a prog the last raid tier in a static and usually PF the EXs and early savage floors on a given tier. That said, I'm not a particularly good player (I blame it on age but tbh it's mostly because I'm just not that good) but I can generally get through stuff with enough persistence.

I set my sights on Emerald EX this past weekend and spent many hours over the entire weekend trying to clear it. Late on Sunday, I did and was overjoyed and felt great for having my persistence rewarded.

Feeling good about myself, the following day I jumped in a FC group to help others do it and we completed it again and I felt good about helping them. Then someone posted the fflogs. I took a look and I saw my green parse and it really took the wind out of my sails. Instead of feeling like I had been helping, I felt like maybe I was just dead weight.

Jump forward to today where I read an unrelated article on reddit about "relative deprivation." It basically stated that "the belief that your situation is worse than others, or that others are doing better than you, can trigger anger and resentment." Digging into the article I discovered that it was more about people's situation in life and how they handle it, but the referenced Teddy Roosevelt quote "Comparison is the thief of joy", made me realize that this is exactly what I was doing in-game. I felt like if others got purple parses and I didn't that it meant something was wrong with me and it took away from what I had done. Seeing it spelled out like this outside the context of the game really helped me realize that I was just ruining my own enjoyment of the game for no reason.

TLDR: Feeling that others were doing better than I was took the fun out of my accomplishments. I now realize that I can enjoy what I've accomplished without having to compare them to others.

submitted by /u/darcstar62
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