Comparison Esteem

I moved this week, which necessitates a number of distateful tasks (cajoling people to help you, renting a truck, cleaning your room ,etc.) The onne thing I love about moving is going through boxes and boxes of my own stuff. It's at once an exciting and depressing experience. Exciting because it's fun to see pictures and items that remind me of where I've been and people I've known, and depressing because there's just so much of it. I can understand wanting to keep pictures, since they are an excellent misdirectional tool to convince people that I am more popular or better-traveled or generally cooler than I actually am. Same goes for newspaper clippings (by or about me), yearbooks, etc. These are all things I can point to and say “I was awesome in the past, and you therefore have reason to believe I am awesome now and will be awesome in the future.” They (kind of) serve a purpose.

What I'm trying to understand is why I feel the need to keep all of this other stuff that, while certainly connected to me, has very little value. Random essays, notebooks, schedules, nametags, and everything else inhabiting the wasteland of minutiae that is every 27-year-old North American’s past. For example: I threw out a terrible 3-page essay from 2001 that I got a B on and I felt a twinge of regret the moment it hit the can. Why? I am not particularly proud of the mark. The information contained therein is useless: I will be surprised should anyone ever again ask my thoughts on Albee’s Three Tall Women, and doubly surprised should I care enough about the question to research my response, and triply surprised should the essay I threw away have contained any information that a quick trip to Wikipedia couldn’t provide. My point is, recyclable properties aside, those are three functionally useless pieces of paper.
I think the reason I keep the useless essays (/nametags/schedules/doodles/and so on) is to misdirect myself into believing how awesome I am now. I look at that B six years later and I know that B would be an A if I were to write the same essay today. Nametags allow me to compare where I used to work compared to where I work now. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a certain sense of nostalgia connected to many of these items (and a wild, narcissistic hope that someday a team of O’Brienologists will need this stuff to completely understand me, their life’s study). But realistically there’s no need to have more than one paper saved per course (or per term, depending on how scholastically dedicated I was for those four months) because the best paper of that course represents the peak of my abilities at that fixed point in time. Anything else is an attempt to justify who I am now by comparing myself to who I was then.

Many of my friends post downright embarrassing photos of themselves on Facebook with captions like “OMG, look at my hair” or “pizza face” or something equally self-deprecating that would be downright fiendish if said about any other fifteen-year-old. These are the same photos that, as teenagers, they begged their parents not to give to their grandparents because it would then make the family newsletter and be seen by 50 relatives (who had likely seen them do much more awkward things already, like running around naked save for an Optimus Prime mask). All the tragic-haired pizza faces have turned it around are now willfully spreading those pictures to hundreds, maybe thousands, of people who don’t understand the poster’s childhood as a backdrop to laugh it off. They are submitting their past into the public record not to explain their present self, but to enhance it. It’s not enough to be an indie kid wearing brands no one has ever seen and being tired of bands no one has ever heard of: you have to be all that and have recovered from wearing Hypercolor with perma-stains under the pits, while swearing that Color Me Badd would be around forever. This is no different from saving B essays. In fact, by inviting (at best) friends and (more often than not) total strangers into the process, it goes from personal self-appreciation to worldwide adulation-seeking.

On its face the practice of comparison-esteem seems very self-centered and, having done no research in support of this theory, I wouldn’t be surprised if it is almost exclusively a North American pursuit. I don’t think it’s unhealthy, unless you become obsessed with proving you're a smarter, cooler, better looking, more tasteful you then you were at 15 (and if you can't do that, then you're really in trouble). I think it's important to remember that the cyclical nature of comparison-esteem requires you to make mistakes in the present so that your future self has something to gloat about. So go do something stupid. You may need it after a rough day ten years from now.