The Theory of Relative Deprivation

People always compare themselves to the people around them. They then make evaluations about their own experience through that frame of reference. Stoper called this the theory of relative deprivation. Later it became the basis for an entire area of study in social psychology. The idea is it's not your objective situation that determines your happiness. It's this invisible frame of reference that you carry in your head, a frame ofreference that you don't even know consciously, that you're using,. But you are using it, and it filters your experience of the world and how your feeling se most people tend to think of absolute deprivation.