---
title: "The Comparison Game"
date: 2026-01-23
url: https://learningischange.com/2026/01/23/the-comparison-game/
author: Ben Wilkoff
categories: ["Stories"]
tags: ["typewriter", "Bars", "New People"]
---

# The Comparison Game

![SwiftScan Jan 23, 2026 12.23 PM.jpeg](/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/SwiftScan Jan 23, 2026 12.23 PM.jpeg)


## Transcript

I like going to bars to write. I like that it is casually social and also that there are drinks. I like that people ask about my dumb digital typewriter. I like that there are sports on the tv to distract me as I thin of what I want to say next. And it really is the only time that I ever meet someone truly new. Like, entirely out of my own parent, middle aged, upper middae class buble.

Sure, the folks that I sit next to are not so very different from me. They almost all have access to their own car because they too drove to the bar. They have access to at least enough disposable income to sit at the bar and egt or drink. They are sometimes a little younger or a little older, but they have roughly the same life experience. Sometimes a great deal more.

I met a man without a "real job" who I could never have come across outside of that environment. He trades crypto and precious. metals. He bets on sports games and plays poker. And he has many "friends" who do the same. He was half chinese and half jewish. He has been abroad and grew up in Boston. but made his way out calls 14 0om to Colorado and calls it home. This is a life that is filled with different choices from my own. He does not have kids. He did not go to school and have a singular bath through a carreer. He believes in the rocketship of investment. He gets high with his buddies and goes snowboarding, splurging on a whole setup on a single day on the slópes because he had a particularly good day and Monarch Casino, where he goes almost exclusively because you can get food and drink at all hours of the day and night•

HE is free in ways that I will never be. But, at least I'n not trying to tip waitresses with a new crypto app. He has seen things I cannot imagine. People being held at gunpoint. People losing ox winning million dollar bets. There are millions of ways to live, and he was embracing one of them. And it took me a lot to not play the comparison game. Functionally, we are equal. Both single. Both in a bar on a Wednesday night. Both having an Old Fashioned and watching the Avs lose. Both interested im talking and listening. Both wanting for connection and companionship. But, we have placed our faith in different things. Different people and different institutions. I don't care about money, whereas he clearly does. I would never buy crypto and would not be interested in the mew app//wallet that he has just found that was clearly an early stage ponzi scheme. But, the similaries were just as glaring as the differences, Maybe more so. And I hope when the

revolution comes, we will see ourselves as comrades, That we will band together insolidarity. He is perhaps more trapped by the system that he precariously holds onto. But, Ian more trapped by my belief in the incremental. Perhaps we arg both

doomed..