Everything is Relative: 3 Ways Relativity Interacts with Growth

Something that has been on my mind lately is relativity, and how nothing we have, do, experience or receive is anything at all in isolation, they mean nothing all by themselves.

Let’s say you were 10th in the world rankings of table tennis last year, and this year you’ve moved to 5th, pretty good right? 

But let’s say this year you’re ranked 2nd, only one behind the best in the world and 3 places higher than 5th, but last year you were number 1, how would you feel? 

This is relativity, and It plays a role in always everything we experience.

Essentially, we get used to a condition, a standard, a way of living, so much that we forget any other forms of being, even ones that we have experienced before. And as soon as our conditions change, we only compare them to whatever they’ve changed from. 

An example of this would be someone who came extremely close to death, a near-death experience. For a while, this person will compare every minor inconvenience to that of almost dying, making them insignificant in comparison.

However, give this person some time and they’ll soon be back to complaining about politics, annoying coworkers and the potholes in the roads. They’ve simply once again gotten used to the standard way of living.

Although this sounds absurd, along with everything else it’s embedded in our human nature. 

But how is any of this important? Well considering it’s everything we experience, it also has everything to do with personal growth, and having an understanding of relativity can significantly improve our levels of enjoyment and even mitigate our levels of suffering. 

Here are 3 things to keep in mind in relation to relativity.

Hedonic Treadmill

A major, if not the biggest part of self-improvement is goal setting. It’s becoming a better version of ourselves in the pursuit of a goal.

The problem with goal setting, however, is how easily we can attach the happiness we want to the goals we set. We think that once we achieve this, or get that, well then we’ll be happy, or then we’ll be satisfied.

Considering relativity, and getting used to new standards, this is almost always wrong. We’re all guilty of this too, how many times have you been excited to get something, only for the novelty and joy of having it quickly wear off?

As a way to combat this, we move the goalpost. We somehow convince ourselves that the last goal wasn’t truly it, and the next milestone will fill the void. Wrong again.

The truth is, we’ll get used to that too, and the next, and the next. 

Does this mean we shouldn’t set goals? Not at all, it means setting goals for the right reason, and understanding that reaching them won’t fix everything.

It’s not the pursuit of happiness, but the happiness in pursuit.

We can use this as a way to enjoy our current moments, we can take a breath and appreciate that by chasing a goal, we’re living in a time that we’ll most likely describe as ‘the good old days’. 

It means setting goals and chasing them, but not resting our whole well-being on the back of them.

Chase goals for the right reason, and enjoy doing it. 

Comparison

Let’s say you’re earning 50k a year, and you’re comparing yourself to someone who earns 100k. You try and keep trying to get there because you think that only when you do will you finally be earning enough.

You reach your goal only to find out that not only does the hedonic treadmill play its part, but you’ve now also got someone who earns 200k to compare yourself to. And so you set that as the next goal and go again.

The truth is, there will always be someone doing better than you.

If you play this game, you’ll be playing it forever, always comparing yourself to the next person who has more.

I want to state that comparing yourself to someone better than you is a good idea when getting yourself out of a rut. If the people you compare yourself to are just like you, or worse, you’ll struggle to have standards good enough to improve.

But once you’re past the point of anything besides tragic, it becomes a never-ending, losing battle.

The better option is to compare yourself to the only real person who matters during self-improvement, you. 

This is also relative. You’ll only be happy to compare yourself to a version that was in some way worse, meaning the levels of satisfaction you experience come from where you were before and where you are now.

So, as long as you’re improving, as long as you’re better than yesterday, or a week, a month or year,  well you’re exactly where you should be. 

Due to relativity, and getting used to standards so quickly, we can easily forget how far we’ve come, sometimes it’s good to look back and smile at the difference between us now, and the previous version.

As comparison is so deeply rooted in us, it’ll be very difficult to not do so at all, so start comparing yourself to yourself, a much better and more satisfying comparison.

Challenges

I want you to try and think about a previous challenge that you’ve faced, it doesn’t have to be the worst day of your life, just something that made you uncomfortable.

Now think about how you’d react to the very same challenge today, I’m guessing you’d handle it much better than before, right?

That’s because by working through that challenge, you’ve grown as a person.

To experience the same level of discomfort from a challenge again, it would have to be a bigger one. The challenge would have to increase in difficulty in relation to how you’ve increased your competence.

How hard we find something is relative to what we’ve experienced before.

This means if something is hard, we are currently going through something that is improving us, it’s quite literally the best sign of growth.

It’s easy to view difficulty as a negative, something to avoid, but when you look at it this way, it’s easy to see how valuable a challenge really is.

The thing is, you already know this. When you lift weights, you’re looking for it to hurt. This is because you know that in order for the muscle to grow, the muscle must tear. 

And once that muscle has become stronger and is now used to that weight, it will need a heavier load in order to keep growing.

Your mind is the exact same, so the next time you’re feeling discomfort during a challenging time, remind yourself that you’re literally experiencing growth as it’s happening and that you’ll be a better version of yourself by the end.