Chapter 3: Feeling Small: Inferiority, Comparison and the Quiet Race

Twenty Years Later

Yuki is forty and works as a bookkeeper for a group of small shops. Last Saturday, she went to a reunion of her old class from secondary school. She had been looking forward to it for weeks. She bought a new dress and had her hair cut. On the way there, she felt excited to see old friends.

At the reunion, the questions began. "What are you doing now?" "Are you married?" "Do you have children?" "Where do you live?" One former classmate had become a surgeon. Another ran her own company. A third had lived in several countries and spoke four languages. Several people showed photographs of large houses, happy families and beautiful holidays. When it was Yuki's turn, she heard herself saying, "Oh, I just do bookkeeping," and quickly changed the subject.

On the train home, Yuki felt heavy. Her life, which had seemed perfectly good that morning, now looked small and grey. She had a job she was good at, a flat she liked, a close friend she saw every week and a cat she adored. But next to the surgeon and the company owner, none of it seemed to count. She spent the evening looking at her classmates' pages online, finding more and more reasons to feel behind.

By Monday, Yuki was irritable at work and short with her friend on the phone. She felt as though she had been running in a race she had not known she had entered, and had just discovered she was losing. She also felt ashamed of feeling this way. "I should be happy for them," she told herself. "Why does their success make me feel so bad?"

It is worth noticing that nothing in Yuki's life had changed between Saturday morning and Saturday night. Her job, her flat, her friend and her cat were exactly the same. What had changed was the measure she was using. In the morning, she was measuring her life by her own sense of whether it was good. By the evening, she was measuring it against the lives of a dozen other people, each chosen for their most impressive feature. No life looks large by that measure, not even the lives of the people being compared.

Yuki's experience touches one of the central ideas in Adler's psychology. Adler believed that feeling small, which he called the feeling of inferiority, is part of every human life. How we respond to that feeling shapes much of what we do, and much of how we relate to other people.

Everyone Begins Small

Adler's interest in inferiority began with the body. Early in his career, in a book published in 1907 and known in English as Study of Organ Inferiority, he wrote about weaknesses in particular organs of the body, such as the eyes, the lungs or the heart. He noticed that people often responded to such weaknesses by working especially hard to make up for them. Sometimes the effort was so strong that a person became unusually skilled in the very area where they had started out weak. Adler called this effort compensation.

Over time, Adler widened this idea from the body to the whole of human life. He pointed out that every human being begins life small, weak and dependent. A baby cannot feed itself, walk or speak. Everyone around it is bigger, stronger and more capable. Adler believed that this early experience leaves every person with a basic feeling of being less than others, a feeling of inferiority. In his late book Social Interest, he went so far as to suggest that to be human is to feel inferior in some way.

This sounds discouraging, but Adler saw it as hopeful. He believed that feelings of inferiority are not a disease or a weakness. They are the spur that moves human beings to learn, grow and improve. A child who feels small tries to stand, walk and talk. An adult who feels they do not know enough reads and studies. A community that feels its life is too hard invents tools and builds shelters. In Adler's view, almost all human progress can be understood as an attempt to move from a feeling of minus to a feeling of plus.

Adler called this movement the striving for significance, or sometimes the striving for superiority. By superiority, he did not necessarily mean being better than other people. He meant moving upward from a felt weakness toward a felt strength: becoming more capable, more complete, more able to cope. This striving is normal and healthy. The question is the direction it takes.

In What Life Should Mean to You, Adler described two broad directions. Striving can go toward what he called the useful side of life: becoming more capable in ways that also help others, such as learning a skill, building something or caring for people. Or it can go toward the useless side: trying to feel superior by putting others down, showing off, controlling people or avoiding challenges. Both directions come from the same feeling of being small. But they lead to very different lives and very different relationships.

When Feeling Small Becomes a Trap

Adler distinguished between the ordinary feeling of inferiority, which everyone has, and what he called the inferiority complex. The feeling of inferiority becomes a complex when a person becomes so discouraged that they stop trying to grow. Instead of saying, "I am not good at this yet, so I will practise," they say, "I am not good at this, so there is no point." The feeling no longer moves them forward. It holds them back.

Adler noticed that people with an inferiority complex often use it, without knowing, as an excuse. They say, in effect, "If only I were taller, richer, cleverer or better looking, I would do great things." As long as the "if only" remains, they never have to test themselves and risk failure. The complex protects them from the pain of trying and failing, but at the cost of never trying at all.

Adler was gentle about this. He did not see people with an inferiority complex as lazy or weak. He saw them as discouraged. Somewhere along the way, they had come to believe that their efforts would not be enough, and so they had withdrawn to protect themselves. What such a person needs, in Adler's view, is not criticism, which only deepens the discouragement, but encouragement: someone who believes in their ability to take a small step forward.

Adler also described what he called a superiority complex. This might sound like the opposite of an inferiority complex, but Adler believed it often grew from the same root. A person who boasts, who always needs to win, who looks down on others or who cannot admit a mistake may be covering a deep feeling of being small. Their show of superiority is a kind of armour. Underneath, they are afraid that if they stop proving themselves, they will be found to be worthless.

Comparison is one of the main places where these patterns show themselves. When we compare ourselves with others, we are measuring our place in a kind of quiet race. If we feel behind, we may fall into discouragement, the "if only" of the inferiority complex. If we feel ahead, we may cling to that position anxiously, needing to stay above others. Either way, the race keeps us from simply living our own lives and from seeing others as companions rather than competitors.

Adler's answer was not to stop striving. It was to change what we compare ourselves with and why. Healthy striving, in his view, compares us with our own past and moves us toward our own growth, while connecting us with others. A useful question is not "Am I ahead of them?" but "Am I growing, and is my growth useful to someone?" When we ask this, other people's success stops being a threat. It can even become an encouragement.

Aleksander and the Promotion

Aleksander is thirty-eight and works as an engineer in a company that designs bridges. He has been there for ten years. Last month, a colleague who joined three years after him was promoted to lead a major project. Aleksander had hoped for the role himself. When the announcement was made, he congratulated his colleague with a smile that felt like it might crack his face.

In the weeks that followed, Aleksander found himself watching his colleague closely, noticing every small mistake. He made sharp comments in meetings. He told his partner that the promotion was unfair, that the colleague was good at politics rather than engineering and that the company did not value real expertise. Part of him knew he was being unkind, but he could not seem to stop.

When Aleksander looked more honestly at himself, with the help of a friend who listened patiently, he found the feeling underneath. He felt small. The promotion seemed to say that he was not good enough. His sharp comments were an attempt to feel bigger by making his colleague seem smaller. It was the useless side of striving, as Adler would have called it, and it was making him miserable and damaging his relationships at work.

Aleksander decided to try a different direction. He asked his manager for an honest conversation about what he would need to develop to lead a project in future. The manager mentioned communication skills and experience in managing budgets. Aleksander signed up for a course and asked to take on a small budget role in his current project. He also made a conscious decision to support his colleague's project rather than undermine it, offering his technical knowledge when it was needed.

A year later, Aleksander has not yet been promoted, but he has grown. He communicates more clearly, understands budgets better and has a better relationship with his colleague, who has asked him to take a key role in the next project. "I was competing with him," Aleksander says. "Now I am competing with the engineer I was last year. That is a race I can actually win."

Aleksander's partner noticed another change. At home, he had stopped talking about his colleague every evening. The energy he had spent watching for someone else's mistakes was now going into his own learning and into their life together. Comparison had been costing him far more than he realized: not only his peace at work, but his attention at home.

Sung-min and the Gifted Cousin

Sung-min is thirteen and has been learning the piano for five years. She practises every day and has made good progress. Her cousin, who is the same age, also plays the piano. At a family gathering last winter, her cousin played a difficult piece beautifully, and the whole family applauded. Several relatives said that the cousin was clearly gifted and would become a professional one day.

Sung-min had planned to play too, but she suddenly said she did not feel well. At home that evening, she told her mother that she wanted to stop piano lessons. "There is no point," she said. "I will never be as good as her." For two weeks, she refused to practise. Her mother was worried, because Sung-min had always loved playing.

Sung-min's reaction is a clear example of what Adler described. Faced with someone who seemed far ahead, she felt small, and the feeling turned into discouragement. "I will never be as good as her" is the kind of sentence that marks the beginning of an inferiority complex. It turns a comparison into a reason to stop.

Her mother did not argue with her or tell her she was just as good as her cousin. Instead, she found a recording of Sung-min playing two years earlier and asked her to listen to it. Then she asked Sung-min to play the same piece now. The difference was obvious. "You are not in a race with your cousin," her mother said. "You are on your own road. Look how far you have come on it." She also asked Sung-min what she loved about playing. Sung-min said she loved how certain pieces made her feel calm.

Sung-min went back to her lessons. Her teacher, who had heard about the family gathering, suggested that she play a duet with her cousin at the next gathering. Sung-min was nervous, but she agreed. The two girls practised together over video calls and discovered that they enjoyed it. At the gathering, they played side by side. The family applauded both of them. Sung-min's cousin told her afterwards that she was always nervous playing alone and liked having a partner. Sung-min realized that her cousin had her own feelings of being small, too.

Wanjiru at the School Gate

Wanjiru is forty-five and has a six-year-old daughter, whom she had later in life than most of the parents she meets at her daughter's school. Every morning at the school gate, she finds herself comparing. The other mothers seem younger, more energetic and more fashionable. They organize birthday parties with elaborate decorations, bake for school events and seem to know all the other parents. Wanjiru works full time as a pharmacist and often arrives at the gate in her work clothes, slightly late.

For months, Wanjiru felt like an outsider. She avoided conversations, assuming the younger parents saw her as old and dull. When her daughter was invited to birthday parties, she worried about whether her own party would be good enough. She began to feel that she was failing her daughter by not being like the other mothers.

One morning, a younger mother whose son was in the same class approached her. She explained that her son had a cough that would not go away, and she wondered whether Wanjiru, who she had heard was a pharmacist, could suggest whether it was worth seeing a doctor. Wanjiru listened, gave her general advice to see the family doctor and mentioned when the local clinic was least busy. The younger mother thanked her warmly and said, "I always feel so disorganized next to you. You seem so calm and sure of yourself."

Wanjiru was astonished. The woman she had been comparing herself with had been comparing herself with Wanjiru, and feeling small in return. This is very common. In the quiet race of comparison, we usually compare what we feel inside with what other people show on the outside. We know our own doubts in detail, but we only see others' confident faces.

After that morning, Wanjiru began to see the school gate differently. She stopped measuring herself against the other parents and started noticing what she could offer. She was calm. She knew about health. She could listen. Over the following months, she became a quiet source of reassurance for several parents. Her daughter's birthday party was simple, but the children had a wonderful time. "I was trying to be like them," Wanjiru says. "It turned out they needed me to be like me."

Practical Steps: Leaving the Quiet Race

The first step is to notice when you are comparing. Comparison often happens very quickly and quietly. You see someone's photograph, hear about someone's achievement or notice someone's appearance, and a feeling arrives: a small sinking, a tightening, a flash of envy. When you notice this feeling, name it: "I am comparing right now, and I feel small." Naming the feeling helps you see it, instead of simply being carried by it.

The second step is to remember that feeling small is normal. Adler believed that everyone has feelings of inferiority. The surgeon at Yuki's reunion, the gifted cousin and the young mothers at the school gate all have their own. Feeling small does not mean you are less than others. It means you are human.

The third step is to change the comparison. Instead of comparing yourself with other people, compare yourself with your own past. Where were you a year ago, five years ago, ten years ago? What have you learned, survived, built or improved? Like Sung-min listening to her old recording, you may find more growth than you expected.

The fourth step is to turn striving toward the useful side. When you feel the push to be better, ask how your growth could be useful to others as well as to yourself. Aleksander turned his disappointment into learning that helped his whole team. Wanjiru turned her knowledge into reassurance for other parents. Striving that connects you with others is more satisfying, and more lasting, than striving that sets you against them.

The fifth step is to watch for the "if only". When you hear yourself thinking, "If only I were younger, richer, cleverer or more confident, I would...," pause. Ask what small step you could take now, as you are. The "if only" is often a way of avoiding the risk of trying. A small step, taken today, breaks its spell.

The sixth step is to limit the triggers that feed comparison when you are vulnerable. Yuki noticed that looking at her classmates' online pages late at night made her feel much worse. She decided not to look at them in the evening. This is not running away. It is choosing not to feed a habit that does not serve you.

Feeling Small Is Not a Flaw to Remove

It might seem that the goal of this chapter is to get rid of feelings of inferiority. That is not Adler's view. He believed that these feelings are part of being human and that they drive much of what is good in human life. Without them, we would have no reason to learn, improve or reach out to others for help. The aim is not to stop feeling small, but to respond to that feeling with courage and connection rather than discouragement or arrogance.

It is also important to say that not every feeling of being behind is only a matter of attitude. Some people really do face unfair disadvantages: less money, less access to education, illness, discrimination or responsibilities that others do not carry. Adler was very aware of this. He worked for better conditions for children and families, and he believed that a fair society should give everyone a chance to develop. Changing the way we compare ourselves is helpful, but it does not mean that real inequalities do not matter, or that people should simply accept them.

In fact, Adler's idea of the useful side of life points in the opposite direction. A person who has faced disadvantage often understands it deeply, and that understanding can become a source of contribution: helping others who face the same barriers, speaking up for fairer conditions or building something that makes the road easier for those who come next. This is striving on the useful side, and it has changed many communities for the better.

Finally, some people feel small in a way that is constant and painful, a deep sense that they are worthless that does not lift. If this describes you, please consider talking to a doctor or another qualified professional. Such feelings can be worked on with skilled support, and you do not have to carry them alone.

A Short Exercise: Your Own Yesterday

This exercise helps you practise comparing yourself with your own past rather than with other people. It takes about twenty minutes.

Take a page and draw a line down the middle. On the left, write "Five years ago." On the right, write "Now." If five years feels too long or too short, choose another period that makes sense for your life.

On the left, write down what you could do, what you knew, what you had and what you were struggling with five years ago. Be honest and specific. "I could not cook more than three meals." "I was afraid to speak in meetings." "I did not know anyone in this town." "I was very unhappy in my old job." On the right, write down how each of these areas looks now. You may find some areas where you have not changed, and that is fine. Look especially for areas where you have grown, even a little.

Then, at the bottom of the page, write down three ways in which your growth has been useful to someone else. Perhaps you now cook for your family. Perhaps your confidence in meetings has helped a project. Perhaps your experience of a hard time helped you support a friend going through something similar. This part reminds you that your growth is not only for you. It connects you with others.

Finally, write one sentence about a direction you would like to grow in during the next year, again with a note on how it might be useful to someone. Keep this page. The next time comparison makes you feel small, read it again. It is a record of your own road, which nobody else is walking.

Yuki did this exercise a week after the reunion. On the left, she wrote that five years earlier she had been in debt, lonely and unsure of her skills. On the right, she wrote that she had paid off her debt, made a close friend and become the person the shop owners trusted most with their accounts. At the bottom, she wrote that her careful work helped five small businesses keep going. She looked at the page for a long time. Her life was not small. It had only looked small from the wrong angle.

Chapter Summary

Adler believed that every human being begins life small and dependent, and that feelings of inferiority are a normal part of every life. These feelings move us to grow, in what he called the striving for significance. Striving can go toward the useful side of life, becoming more capable in ways that help others, or toward the useless side, trying to feel superior by putting others down or avoiding challenges. When discouragement takes over, the feeling becomes an inferiority complex, often hidden behind "if only". A show of superiority can cover the same feeling.

Yuki at her reunion, Aleksander after the promotion, Sung-min and her gifted cousin, and Wanjiru at the school gate all found that comparison with others made them feel small and pulled them into a quiet race. By comparing themselves with their own past and turning their striving toward contribution, they found a calmer and more connected way of growing. Feeling small is not a flaw to remove, and real inequalities still matter.

In the next chapter, we will look at a practical question that helps in almost every relationship: whose task is this?