I started providing for my family at eighteen. Not helping. Providing. The front person on the household expenses, the name the problems came looking for.
I've always wanted to create my own project, but entrepreneurship involves risk, and that risk varies from household to household, regardless of what you hear on podcasts. For the founders I studied, risk meant embarrassment, perhaps a gap year explained over dinner. For me, risk meant that if I failed, people I love would go under with me.
I kept postponing... and then postponed once more. Ten years and change, watching people my age take leaps I could have taken blindfolded if the only person I was responsible for had been me.
Instead, I did the slow thing: I got the good job, saved like it was a religion. And after all those years, I stood there with half a million in the account and finally jumped. Could I have done it sooner? I think so. But once you've lived with scarcity, a gremlin in your head can make half a million sound like not enough.
I've also connected with other founders and gradually learned how they handle risk-taking. Observing these behaviors has become a personal interest of mine. Initially, I was wondering how I could borrow their map and use the same approach; how naive of me.
I met a guy from Miami who got into Y Combinator as a solo founder, something that almost never happens because they overwhelmingly fund teams. As we talked, I learned that he was building a fintech startup and that his father owned a bank in Mexico. No, his map cannot be used as a reference.
Eventually, I met another founder who, on paper, had started exactly where I had: bootstrapped, no investors, the same amount of capital. For a moment, it felt like we'd taken the same path. Then I learned where the money had come from: family.
By the time our balance sheets matched, our instincts had already diverged. We looked like we were standing at the same starting line. We weren't.
The part where I thought I'd won
I've made this claim a few times, and it fits here again: no one can walk in someone else's shoes.
I used to believe I would make wiser choices because my funds couldn't be replenished, and it is well known that cheap money often leads to poor decisions. Also, I used to think that even if my situation was rougher, the consolation was that I could answer "Can I make it on my own in life?" more cleanly than the peer who always had the parachute.
Then I gave up on that story, because I caught what it was: a soothing mechanism. "I had no support, therefore when I finally get there, I'll be stronger than most." My brain was just matching the reward to the effort. Mine cost more, so mine had to buy more, right? You get the company, I get the company plus the self-assurance; a dividend I invented so the decade wouldn't have been spent on nothing.
But if I follow that logic honestly, it turns on me. The person who raised the same money in one phone call might be paying for it in ways I can't see: family pressure, conditional love, the specific terror of disappointing the people funding you.
A nervous-system drain I have no instrument to measure.
And that's the whole point of "no one can walk someone's shoes": it's symmetric. If fear is calibrated differently in every body, then I don't get to rank my suffering above theirs any more than they get to dismiss mine. The principle that prevents me from judging their fear also prevents them from judging mine.
The entire foundation of this essay is that we cannot know what someone else is carrying. But somehow, when it came to my own pain, I was willing to make an exception. We all are... why?
Because comparison gives us something we desperately want: a verdict.
We don't just compare because we are curious about other people. We compare because uncertainty is uncomfortable. We want to know whether what happened to us was fair, whether the price we paid was reasonable, whether the sacrifices we made were worth something.
A harder road should lead somewhere better. A greater struggle should yield a greater reward. A person who carried more should eventually be able to put the weight down and say, "See? It counted".
Because the truth is, overpaying without getting more makes us feel like idiots, and this is the moment our minds try to bargain with reality.
Except that life does not keep clean records, and the feeling of overpayment exists only inside our heads because there's no universal currency for fear, effort, or hesitation. No exchange rate between a person who grew up knowing someone would catch them and someone who grew up knowing they had to catch everyone else. No formula that can convert ten years of postponed dreams into a measurable amount of certainty.
And still, we keep trying. We are, in fact, obsessed with comparison.
Why we compare anyway
Who worked harder? Who suffered more? Who deserved it more? Who had the harder path?
We ask these questions as if there is some hidden scoreboard somewhere, some final authority that can tell us whose burden was heavier.
But I think comparison is often less about other people than it is about ourselves.
We are trying to answer a much more personal question: Did what happened to me make sense? Was it fair?
The thought that the universe can be one-sided hurts too much to bear without looking for a beacon.
It is difficult to accept that two people can do everything right and still end up with different outcomes. It is difficult to accept that someone can sacrifice years without receiving a special reward for it.
The mind wants the universe to balance its books.
If something cost us a lot, we want it to have purchased something equally valuable. If something hurt us, we want the pain to have produced a lesson. If we struggled, we want the struggle to mean we are now owed something.
"Everything happens for a reason", for when something hurt us for no reason.
"The best is yet to come", for when we struggle.
"The universe is preparing you for something bigger", for when we feel hopeless.
“Delayed gratification.”, for when we feel we are giving too much for nothing.
Maybe these are just yet another desperate attempt to explain life's absurdity.
They don't work. Not really. Not for long.
So, what remains?
Something quieter. And maybe something funnier, if you squint.
My fellow founders started from different places, carried different weights, faced different fears. Some had parachutes. Some had only their own hands to break the fall.
I spent years believing I was at a disadvantage and, in some respects, I was. But that experience also taught me how to keep moving forward even when there was no certainty of stable ground.
Not because it made me stronger. Not because I'm grateful. It just became part of me.
I know the temperature of that water. How difficult it was to swim to the shore. How many sharks there were in the way.
And frankly? That's about as good as it gets.
So here we are: a bunch of people who swam through different waters, dodged different sharks, and are still trying to figure out who had it worse.
And I know none of this will make us stop comparing ourselves. We can't help it; it is too human.
But maybe next time we catch ourselves doing it, we'll laugh. At all of us. At how ridiculous it is to attempt to rank pain.
Cheers to life's absurdities.
