8 Reasons Why Having A Me Vs. The World Mentality Sabotages Your Chances Of Success

Having a me vs. the world mentality is far more common than you think. A lot of us have it and believe we are somehow pitted against others unfairly. And naturally, it is something that becomes solidified whenever we face failure, social rejection, and loss of opportunities that we thought we deserved.

A me vs. the world mentality is exactly what it sounds like – having a bias against others because you feel threatened by them competing with you for superiority, material prosperity, and recognition. This may feel like a reassurance of competence and a blanket of security for you, but it ultimately ends up revealing itself as a ruthless and bitter monster that sabotages your chances of genuine success – the kind that isn’t dependent upon how much better you look than others.

This mentality severs connections and instills irrational paranoia. It makes you feel like you’re better than you really are, and it skews how you view other people. Ultimately, it is a hindrance that negatively impacts us in both our professional and personal lives.

Here are the reasons why having a me vs. the world mentality hurts you and sabotages your chances of success:

1. It makes you believe that all the odds are stacked against you and everything is a brutal battle that you must win at all costs – ironically, even at the cost of your own success.

When you have a me vs. the world mentality, you live as though life is a battle you must win, no matter how much it puts your mind into a hypervigilant state and causes you to judge people for being potential competitors who are trying to take away something you feel like you deserve. Instead, you’ll actually be pushed aside and alienated more if you constantly refuse to further your own growth, as a result of being so busy criticizing those who are closer to getting what you want.

2. It hinders your ability to make genuine connections with people because you’re too busy with overanalyzing what they say and do.

This makes you have an unhealthy obsession with ruthlessly judging and analyzing other people’s speech and actions, causing further division between you and others who have the potential to help you grow. You self-sabotage much more when you’re focusing too much on trying to outdo others and refusing to connect with them out of petty jealousy.

3. You feel easily threatened by anyone who has something better than you.

This only brings chronic stress and feelings of inferiority. Learning from people who have more experience is valuable for continuous self-improvement. They can offer you some insights that would help you go further in life, which is more effective than relying solely on yourself and being driven only by your ego’s manic desire to be “the best.”

4. It causes you to view others through a dark lens of jaded cynicism.

While people are motivated by self-interest to a certain degree, including you, it is wrong to assume that everyone out there is deliberately against you. Most people are just trying to do the best they can to survive another day, and you waste your time and energy by antagonizing them for it.

5. You try to make this mentality self-evident by comparing yourself to others and falsely judging them for having lives that are somehow easier than yours, based on what you see on the outside.

Assuming that others succeed more easily than you is a symptom of not putting in the work to make yourself the best you can be. When you believe that the system is dead set against you, you self-destruct by relinquishing control over your own life and blaming others for your misfortunes and failures.

6. You think that this mentality is serving you by making you feel secure with who you are.

But it actually exacerbates feelings of insecurity when you’re only loving yourself based on conditional measures of success and loathing yourself whenever others win and you lose. True security doesn’t depend winning every time or having accomplishments validate who you are as an individual.

7. You’re quick to point out the vices that other people have as a way to reassure that you’re morally superior to them.

If you’re so caught up with all the vices that others have that you don’t (drinking too much, spending too much, flirting too much, showing off too much, etc.), your inner cynic kicks in and makes you feel resentful for their success, since you falsely view yourself as morally superior (and hence, more deserving of good things in life). Attacking someone’s character only reveals that you yourself are arrogant, unwilling to change yourself, and too fixated upon using other people’s vices to hide your own deficiencies.

8. You’re distrusting of other people’s motives and too trusting of your own.

You think that your motives are better than other people’s, but this only shows that you have unfair prejudices against others when you falsely believe that you are against the world for some noble purpose. However, the root of a me vs. the world mentality is nothing more than a delusion of grandeur, which makes you feel like you’re somehow always right, and you desperately need to prove that the world is oppressive towards you. But in the end, this motive only brings failure and feelings of worthlessness. One crucial step towards success is humbly admitting that you’re not as great as you think you are in order to move past your self-sabotaging ways and finally envision how you can create a life that’s completely free from the need to use others’ failures to make your success evident.