When a good friend buys a new car

Your personality has made it into a life goal for himself to make your world 'work' according to the standards and values he has adopted, and preferably in a way in which he himself somehow is better of than the other persons around. Let's assume that your personality has adopted a standard on cars: about their price/size/performance, and that they have to be 'new'. When you yourself bought a new car, your personality had a great time: your friend had an 'old two-year old, and even though theirs is slightly bigger than yours, the fact that yours is new, was enough for your personality to feel good about himself.

Now this friend buys a new car, and you find yourself at the other end of your own scale. Now your car not only is still smaller, it also is older than the one of your friend. This is not a situation where your personality can score successfully, especially when there is no outlook for you on buying another one (even though many economies thrive on this mechanism where people do choose to what they believe is rebalancing the situation through buying a new one themselves).
Now what? Monitor the activities of your own thoughts when a situation like this is at hand. There will be all kinds of thinking patterns in order to make the situation still 'work' for you (= have your personality somehow feel better over something), and this can take days and days. You are likely to find yourself drifting away from the subject of the car, since you know for sure that you cannot score there, your personality has noted that quickly. So you have to reconsider other aspects, for example: your house is slightly bigger since you have a garage, or more rooms, or a nicer garden. Or you went to a holiday resort which was further away from home than they did. Or ... your personality is likely to search and reconsider just as long till he finds something through which he can feel better than this friend, even be it for a trivial reason like his partner being fatter than yours or such.

This is a fine example of becoming aware that your own experience of 'peace' and 'good' through your personality not only depends on what you do yourself, it is also closely related to the fact that the people around you do not do this kind of things too often, because this usurps much of your mental activity. You will find that the number of situations where you truly mean the expression 'good for you', turns out to be absolutely minimal when you take a good look at it. You are likely to experience a form of rejection of the other person since he is the one who makes you feel uncomfortable now - again, according to your personality. So you also fool yourself because of the socially desired response which, since you have believed it to be a truth in itself, only is followed by the idea of you being wrong somehow because you know your compliments were not true, they did not really come from your heart.

Presumably nobody has told you up till now that you can deal with situations like this in a different way, and that what is really you, is your inner Self, which you can simply experience whenever you like. The only thing you have to do for this, is face everything you put in the way of experiencing this, and let it go. Use examples like the one in this column to become aware of all these (embarrassing) personality steps (which your personality usually wants to hide from your awareness), perceive them and see them for what they really are: defence mechanisms of a personality who finds that all of a sudden he cannot meet his own standards anymore. This is not a fault, there is nothing wrong with you, this is what personalities do. However, you can choose to will differently and in favour of your inner Self. So make a start to let go of your investment in the idea that upholding a personality is your favourite way of living.