Ask HN: What are some good books on how to stop comparing yourself to others?

The less-healthy forms of comparison build on a platform of inner poverty. You can say the outer world is naturally built up in one's mind as an emergent effect which must yield the hallucinated opposite, in order to relieve the strain on the inner tools, which aren't yielding enough traction.

So a good book for this would be anything that builds up the inner world/personal resources, and particularly the inner world as a deep and consistent problem-solving resource. Such books would cover:

- Journaling (Tristine Rainer is a good author here)

- Planning (appropriate to the compared aspects, e.g. retirement planning if you have friends who are retiring, etc.)

- Scheduling (i.e. self-programming for performative self-help)

- Therapeutic Tools (from self-hypnosis to e.g. personal testing and measurement like in David Burns' TDTSE)

This way, to the degree that one is left to "themselves vs. the others" thinking patterns, they also have parallel access to a variety of solutions, both to the issue of comparison itself and to the specific areas raising the stress as well.

In addition, classes and things like certification courses can be really helpful.

I'd also recommend _Please Understand Me_ 1st ed. by Keirsey to contextualize subjective vs. objective needs. Keirsey provides a platform on which to make one's subjective perspective on self & others more objective.

Some think they need to need money in boundless amounts, when they later find they are happier prioritizing ongoing learning, for example, and establishing a minimum security & contingency budget.

As you work on this pathway of yours in depth, you'll naturally build a firmer identity as well. You'll become less comparable in the sense that you'll feel like more like a fractal than a set of dimensions of comparability, and that will be more obvious to both you and others.

Good luck & hang in there...

In a postitive way? Literature is filled with cautionary tales of people who find existential truth separate from the opinions of the world, but at a cost. Becoming a solipsist, iconoclast, nihilist....

Try Camus (Stranger), Cervantes (Don Quixote). Dostoyevsky (Notes from the Underground), Salinger (Catcher in the Rye), and there's plenty in Bronte (all of them), Blake and Hardy.

But I suspect these aren't the droids you're looking for.

Not a how to guide, but an outline in a poem.

If--- by Rudyard Kipling https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46473/if---

For more concrete guides, I'd say Jordan Peterson. I haven't read his books, but his youtube videos and interviews help.