A few nights ago, I did something pathetic and, sadly, very modern.
I stayed awake for hours staring at someone else’s life as if they were blowing through money they’d inherited (most likely from an elderly lover with a sketchy cough).
Lit by the cold blue light of my phone, I conducted a forensic investigation into why their career appeared to be gliding along like a luxury yacht, while mine felt like a shopping trolley with a locked wheel, being dragged through wet cement.
They had something I wanted.
Actually, to be more accurate, they had several things I wanted. Momentum. Attention. Numbers moving in the right direction. Signs from God. Proof that the machine was working.
And I reacted to this with the dignity of someone banned from Sudafed.
Refresh. Check. Compare. Refresh. Catastrophise. Refresh again, just in case the internet had decided that I, too, was worthy in the last seven seconds.
It had not.
This is the sort of behaviour I would normally see in other people and say things like “don’t compare yourself to others” and “you are on your own journey.”
Which is easy to say. Punch-in-the-neck infuriating to hear.
The past few months have been really intense. My online content has performed well. Better than well. There have been moments of growth and attention, and those delicious little spikes of validation make your brain say, “Ah, this is who we are now. We are a person for whom things happen.”
Which is lovely until they stop happening at the exact pace you’ve decided you deserve.
That’s the problem with a run of success. It doesn’t just make you happy. It recalibrates your expectations. Five scraps of attention and you’re grateful. Fifty and you’re encouraged. A few months of visible momentum and suddenly anything less feels like the beginning of the end.
Your brain is astonishingly quick at turning a gift into a baseline.
You tell yourself that you’re grounded. You tell yourself that you understand that creative work, career reinvention, and building something from scratch are inconsistent, messy and non-linear.
You lie to yourself that you’re not ruled by numbers.
Then, after one quiet week, you’re Googling “Back-alley euthanasia” because a post didn’t do as well as the last one.
It’s amazing how quickly a grown adult can become emotionally dependent on an app mostly designed to sell supplements and softcore fascism.
Beneath all of that, beneath the vanity, and the dopamine, and the sheer embarrassment of checking your own relevance like a lab rat pressing a pellet lever, there is something more serious and much less funny.
Fear.
Not the noble sort that belongs in books and movies. Or the kind you feel when a mad king has the nuclear codes. I’m talking about selfish fear.
The fear that the window is closing. That everyone else has worked out a route through the maze, and you’re still licking the walls. The fear that other people getting what you want means there is less of it left. The fear that you are behind or that the progress you’ve made so far was a fluke. The fear that if things do not keep moving quickly, they are not moving at all. The fear that you don’t have what it takes to keep going, and what others will think if you give up.
Which are all absurd, obviously. But many things are absurd and still manage to ruin a perfectly good Wednesday.
I know all the right language for this. Scarcity mindset. Comparison trap. External validation. Attachment to outcomes. I can identify every psychological pattern like a tour guide describing local wildlife as it mauls a chunk out of my leg.
But naming a thing is not the same as stopping it.
That is one of the more annoying aspects of adulthood. You can be incredibly emotionally literate and still behave like a dumbass.
I think this is what makes the middle of reinvention so exhausting.
At the beginning, there is at least novelty. You get to feel brave. You get points simply for starting. Everyone claps because you’ve left the dock.
Then comes the middle, where you are less dazzled by your own courage. You have already started. Nobody throws you a parade for continuing. You are just a person doing the work, again, with no guarantee that today’s effort will produce anything visible this week, or this month, or in a way that will satisfy your nervous system.
The middle is all lag.
You do the work here, and the results show up over there, later, maybe.
But because human beings are idiots, we keep trying to judge progress using the one measurement most guaranteed to distort it: how it feels right now.
And that, I think, is where so much unnecessary suffering comes from.
Because the work and the feeling of the work are not the same thing.
A day can feel terrible and still be useful. A week can feel flat and still be part of momentum. A season can feel slow while something important is assembling itself underneath.
But this is deeply unsatisfying information when you are tired and jealous and haven’t slept because some other bastard got the thing.
What you want in those moments is not wisdom. You want evidence on your dashboard. A little note from the universe saying, “Relax, sweetheart, this humiliating phase is necessary.”
Instead, you get silence. And silence is where bad habits breed.
That’s when you start trying to control timing. You act as though enough vigilance might somehow bully reality into moving faster.
It doesn’t.
I recently heard Lisa Kudrow tell Conan O’Brien that Valerie Cherish, her character in The Comeback, survives humiliation with a simple mantra:
“It’s okay. It’s just what it takes.”
I love it because it doesn’t tell me to be above it.
It doesn’t ask me to transcend envy, or become one of those Buddhist monk types who greet every setback with kimchi and perspective.
It just gives my frontal lobe something simple to say while my amygdala is running around with a knife.
It’s okay.
Not great. Not ideal. Not a blessing in disguise.
Just okay.
It’s just what it takes.
The lag. The envy. The humiliation of caring this much. Feeling deranged. The comedown after validation. The nights when somebody else’s good news feels like an attack. The mornings when you are tired, ashamed, and no closer to wisdom than you were the day before.
Yes, it feels awful.
Yes, I hate that I care.
Yes, I would love this to be smoother, faster, and more dignified.
But it’s okay.
It’s just what it takes.
It’s just the price of wanting something worth having.
VERDICT: Advice Accredited.
Andy Procopis is a comedian and host of the Advice Accreditation Bureau podcast, a completely fake government department committed to investigating the nonsense advice people keep repeating as wisdom. You can listen here and subscribe to his Substack here.
This piece was originally published on Advice Accreditation Bureau, and has been republished here with full permission.
The post How Valerie Cherish Snapped Me Back To Reality After Crashing Out Over Comparison Culture appeared first on PEDESTRIAN.TV .
