A Life Beyond Measuring Up
Shariq Ali
Valueversity
Until the fifth grade, we went to the same school. We were close friends. Then our paths diverged, we moved to different schools, and for nearly three years we did not see each other.
When we finally met again, we were delighted.
But almost as soon as the greetings were over, my friend did something curious. He came and stood right beside me. Holding his hand level above our heads, he began comparing his height with mine.
He wanted to know which of us had grown taller.
It was an innocent childhood moment. Yet when I look back on it now, it seems to carry a meaning far beyond the playground.
We grow up, but somehow we never quite stop standing beside one another and measuring our height.
Only the measuring sticks change.
Old friends meet after many years, and soon positions, incomes and the achievements of children enter the conversation.
We see someone’s new car or visit their new home, and almost without noticing, we place our own life beside theirs—our house beside their house, our success beside their success, our happiness beside their happiness.
A well-known book that examines this human tendency from a different angle is The Courage to Be Disliked, in which Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga explore the ideas of Alfred Adler through a series of philosophical dialogues.
One of its central questions might be expressed quite simply:
Are we living our own lives, or merely measuring ourselves by other people’s standards?
Adler’s thought warns against turning life into a perpetual contest. If everyone around me becomes a rival, then every achievement of theirs becomes a measure of my own worth.
Their larger house makes mine seem smaller. Their promotion diminishes my position. Even their happiness can begin to cast a shadow over my own.
And yet another person growing taller does not make us even a centimetre shorter.
The book also asks an important question about the past: must what has happened to us determine who we are destined to become?
We cannot rewrite the past, but we retain some freedom in deciding what place it will occupy in our present. Modern psychology, however, adds an important caution: psychological trauma can have real and lasting consequences. Perhaps, then, the more balanced truth is this:
The past is part of our story, but we need not allow it to write the final chapter.
Another particularly practical idea in Adlerian thought is the “separation of tasks.”
I can do my work with integrity. I can speak to others with respect. I can be sincere in my relationships.
But I cannot completely control what another person thinks of me.
That belongs to their side of the boundary.
The difficulty begins when doing good work is no longer enough; we also need others to declare it good. Being happy is no longer enough; our happiness must be seen, admired and acknowledged.
And so begins the hunger for approval—a hunger that has no natural point of satisfaction.
The courage to be disliked is not a licence for rudeness, selfishness or indifference. It is the courage to respect others without making their approval a condition for living our own lives.
Adler’s thought seeks to free us from dependence on other people’s opinions, not from our connection with other people. A good life also contains the quiet knowledge that our presence has been of some use to another human being.
There is, after all, a profound difference between wanting to get ahead of others and wanting to be of use to others.
The first turns life into a race.
The second gives it meaning.
Even now, when that childhood scene returns to me, I feel no embarrassment about my friend standing beside me to compare our heights. We were children. We genuinely wanted to know which of us had grown taller during those three years apart.
Perhaps the real problem is that many of us continue measuring our height long after childhood has ended.
Only now we use different rulers.
A house. A car. A title. Fame. Income. The achievements of our children.
But why should any of these become the measuring tape for another person’s life?
Every human being begins from a different place, encounters different circumstances, receives different opportunities, chooses different priorities and travels a different road.
Perhaps The Courage to Be Disliked is, at heart, an invitation to put the measuring tape away.
Instead of standing beside another person and asking who stands taller, perhaps we should ask something else:
Where was I yesterday?
Where am I today?
And has my presence made another human being’s life, even in some small way, better?
Perhaps one sign of emotional maturity is that we finally stop measuring our height against others.
And learn to live without measuring our lives by someone else’s ruler.
Intellectual reference: This essay is inspired by the ideas of Alfred Adler as presented in Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga’s The Courage to Be Disliked. The concepts from the book are explored here through personal observation, interpretation and a critical perspective.