Searching for God Knows What: Day Three

I finished reading book number four on my 2009 reading list: Donald Miller’s Searching for God Knows What. Miller has proved once again that he writes the books and exact statements I wish I were capable of writing. This week I’ll be posting bits of the book I wish I’d written.

Humans, as a species, are constantly, and in every way, comparing themselves to one another, which, given the brief nature of their existence, seems and oddity and, for that matter, a waste. Nevertheless, this is the driving influence behind every human’s social development, their emotional health and sense of joy, and sadly, their greatest tragedies.
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The better basketball team? the alien might question, wondering out loud why twenty thousand people would show up to find out which basketball team was better than the other.
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You are trying to feel right by comparing yourself to others. It is ridiculous. Who told you there was anything wrong with you in the first place? Don’t you know that a human is just a human?
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Listen to the conversations you have for the next week… you’ll probably hear a hidden conversation beneath the real conversation. Stuff like movies and food and people become ideas, and we all are deciding whether we’re on the right or wrong side of these ideas, knowing that if we aren’t on the right side, there is a price to pay.

Here Miller took the perspective of an alien to our world, trying to see the underlying drive of the human psyche from an external perspective. He argues that the driving motivation of most of our actions is to compare ourselves to everyone else, judge others and to find ways to be seen as better than others.

It’s the social food chain. We don’t do much to improve humanity if all we care about is appearing good to those around us. Not to mention the fact that it doesn’t make much sense given, as Miller said, the brevity of our existence and the fact that we are all humans, none better than any other.