You know which cartoon character I have always thought was a little weird? Pluto.
Pluto is Mickey Mouse’s pet dog first introduced in the 1930s. Mickey and all of his friends are anthropomorphic cartoon characters that walk and talk and think like humans.
But not Pluto. Pluto is a pet dog.
This relationship is especially weird in light of Goofy.
Goofy is theoretically also a dog. But he is an anthropomorphic character who wears clothes, talks, and walks upright like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.
Is he a dog? Is he a human? What’s the difference between Goofy and Pluto?
You start to see where I am coming from when I said it was all a bit weird.
So what does this matter?
I think the characterizations of Pluto and Goofy especially give us a great metaphor to explore.
Hear me out.
The most straightforward interpretation is that we all, at one point or another, find ourselves in the role of Goofy.
We all at some point have looked down on someone else as somehow less than. We build out our identity along cultural, political, ideological, and even sports team lines. Anyone on our side of the aisle is superior to anyone on the other side. We view ourselves as superior to someone else who is not nearly so different as we tell ourselves (except for Tottenham fans, they really do have some pretty big character red flags).
If there is one overlying theme of human history, you would struggle to find one more prevalent than the story of two peoples who seem to the outside to be almost identical fighting over nuanced ideological differences.
The solution to being a Goofy is to keep your identity small. Paul Graham has a great essay on this. He argues, and I agree, that issues are divisive, not because answers are opaque, but because people attribute parts of their personal identity to one side or the other of the debate. People hold too many things as part of their identity in this day and age, and because of that there are infinitely many ideological hills they are willing to die on. You keep your identity small, and all the sudden you don’t have a bone in many of the fights you see play across the news and social media. You can look at people like people instead of Pluto.
Now, what if we turned the metaphor around a bit?
What if we aren’t just Goofy sometimes?
What if we are Pluto?
How often do we attribute false significance and importance to someone else while belittling ourselves?
I don’t know about you but this is something that happens to me, if I had to guess, only about all the time.
We build others and their accomplishments up in our head while simultaneously minimizing our own.
This is a serious issue in the age of Instagram.
We get these tiny windows into the top 5% of someone’s life. We extrapolate that 5% and then we compare this unrealistic perspective to our own life.
Our faults, our struggles, our challenges, and our failures.
How can we measure up?
We can’t.
But that is only because we are stacking the deck against ourselves.
We perceive that others have power over us and in doing so give them power over us. We live inside prisons of our own creation.
I know I do this. Especially professionally.
I compare my achievements to what others achieve without even knowing 1% of the picture of their lives.
If you find yourself falling into this trap, it’s important to remember that comparison is the death of joy. Don’t compare yourself to someone else whose life you don’t really know anything about. Instead compare yourself to where you were three years ago. I bet viewed through this lense things look quite different indeed.
Whether you are a Pluto or a Goofy, it’s important to remember that, at the end of the day, we are all just dogs.