From very early on, still a child, I was struck by grown-ups comparing themselves or comparing one another. In a very large family, we children were often brought before the adults’ tribunals, who defined us with their noisy judgments. They themselves had no idea of the small wounds opening in those young psyches.

Similarly, in children’s stories, here and there, tragedies were the outcome of an endless sequence of comparisons. I believe everyone remembers Snow White’s stepmother who, already owner of the girl’s father and his possessions, despairs when she compares herself with her stepdaughter’s fair beauty. With the dubious partnership of her “magic” mirror, constrained, threatened and forced to keep the queen on the undisputed podium of beauty, the sentence for Snow White, who won the comparison, was death.

A drama that repeats itself exhaustively, with rankings in schools, companies and, curse of curses, on social media. There is a definition detached from reality, of standards and criteria, and people place themselves (or are placed) beyond or short of those maddened limits.

Comparing people is violent, a violence so absurd and so forceful that it causes pain and wounds carried through life. There is pain on both sides: for the one who compares and for the one struck by the comparison. Often, this is a practice passed from one generation to the next, naturalizing the violence or even calling it a “method.”

Permeating this process, far from simple, is a rather collective difficulty in thinking, reflecting, analyzing the data of objective reality. The farther we move from reality, the more we use our inner repertoires to judge, others and ourselves.

Our inner dialogues, omnipresent representatives of the adults who helped form our Parent ego state, shrink our perspective and crumble our objective perception of reality. They are abrasive noises that occupy the space of serenity, of self-knowledge, of building a compassionate relationship with who we are and with our history.

Under that weight, and without the undeveloped ability to think, what remains is the escape valve of judging and, as a result, comparing.

It is a momentary relief that leads us to label people, things, events, all of it measured against our blurred or disqualified inner images.

A very short-lived relief pushes people to seek filters, interventions and positionings that make them narrow the gulf that, fancifully, separates them from the standards. That gulf seems to grow faster than the measures taken.

The frenzy of comparing and judging pushes people further and further away from the possibility of reconciling with the real images of themselves, of the other and of reality.

Today, the magic mirror that once drove Snow White’s stepmother mad is multiplied across millions of screens. Children, young people and adults are abducted by the despair of being compared and of not “looking like,” or not “being better than,” or not “being that bad,” generating plots out of horror stories.

Stories multiply of people fraudulently taking on lives or characters that do not belong to them. People are excluded for failing to meet the demands of a mutatis mutandis standard that maintains historic pillars of exclusion by race, gender, socioeconomic status, origin, ethnicity, religious or political ideology and sophisticates them, adding layers that are transmitted in epidemic acceleration from one person to another and, then, to the generations that follow. Many give up along the way.

We humans are not comparable. To nothing, not even to another human being. Each person’s story is utterly particular; every step has its own rhythm and direction.

Unique and incomparable, each person can offer the mosaic of existence their own color, their own light, their own music, their own rhythm and their own shadows. Unique, incomparable and thinking, each person can join other thinking people to build possibilities of expansion and progress, to flee the shriveled swamps of judgments and comparisons.