Happiness grows at our own firesides, and is not to be picked in strangers’ gardens.

Comparison sends you looking for a life that was grown in someone else’s conditions, and it never transplants well. What actually sustains you tends to be ordinary and close at hand: the people in your house, the work you do, the small routines nobody photographs. Those things are unglamorous precisely because they are yours, and familiarity makes them hard to see.

Spend a day this week counting what is already good where you are. When you catch yourself measuring against someone else, turn the attention back and name one thing you would miss if it went.