Looking up or Looking down?

In life, there is always someone we have as our role model, someone we look up to, someone's example we can follow. But what if you live in in an environment where you have no one that you can relate to and look up to? a place where you learn things from your your peers and influence each other?

In social Comparison Theory, it says that people look out of themselves and to the world and the others to evaluate, criticise, improve or to understand more about themselves. there are two types of comparisons: Upward comparison and Downward comparison.

Being able to compare with someone better than you, in terms of achievement, looks, abilities or any other thing, is a good thing. From these comparisons, we are able to mould ourselves more to our role models and selectively learn the stuff we see in these people. But learning from the wrong people, or rather, no one to learn from, where do we head from there?

Downward comparison on the other hand, lets us view ourselves through another set of glasses. In this comparison, we look out for a different set of people. We would find people that are less fortunate than us, less capable than us, and worse off than ourselves in any possible way.

Is this healthy? always looking down on others and thinking you are far better than some, or at times, most of the people? does this really help you improve, or is it an avenue for us to escape reality? i've heard people saying that in order to fight the monster, we first have to face it. how true is that? if we have no courage to even face the monster, how do we expect to win against it? and know what? often a time, the biggest monster lies within us. and its the hardest to look into the mirror to see it and acknowledge it.

in a world where if we dun improve, we'll be obselete, we have to find ways and means or people to help us improve and continue to climb the corporate ladder in life. and for that to happen, we have to have less of downward comparison and more of upward comparison.