Ajaan Maha Boowa calls forms of conceit the fangs of unawareness. They bite when, for some reason you can’t focus solely on what you’re doing and the results of your actions, you start to focus on other people and compare yourself with them.

"Conceit is one of the last fetters to be let go. Only arahants are freed from those last five fetters. But still even though they’re the last to be let go, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work at them now.

The Buddha talks about conceit in two places. In one, he lays out nine kinds of conceit, basically where you compare yourself with other people.

In the first set of three, you actually are better than the other person and you think you’re better or you think you’re worse or you think you’re equal.

In the next set, you’re actually equal to the other person and you think you’re better or you think you’re worse or you think you’re equal. In other words, even when you’re right about the relative level, it’s still conceit.

In the last three, you’re actually worse than the other person and you think you’re better or you think you’re worse or you think you’re equal. Here again, even when your comparison is correct, it’s still conceit.

Ajaan Maha Boowa calls these forms of conceit the fangs of unawareness. They bite when, for some reason you can’t focus solely on what you’re doing and the results of your actions, you start to focus on other people and compare yourself with them. It’s something we all do. But the question is, what do we get out of it?

If we compare ourselves in the sense of seeing something that they do that we admire and we want to develop that quality within ourselves, then it’s a useful kind of conceit. Or if we see something that they do that we realize is not a good thing, we turn around and look inside ourselves to see if we have that same unskillful quality: Again that’s a good use for conceit.

But most of us don’t use it that way. We find other ways of using it and we can get eaten up by the way we compare ourselves with other people. And so, as with any defilement, the best way to look at this is to see: What do you gain by making those comparisons? There may be a little sense of satisfaction you get from making the comparisons but it’s pretty paltry, and it’s really not worth all the effort that goes into it.

So when you see that happening in the mind, recognize it for what it is: a fetter. It ties you down, keeps you coming back. We don’t have to think about coming back through many lifetimes — even right here it just keeps you coming back to the same old mind-state that somehow tries to find some satisfaction out of making comparisons, hoping against hope that you’ll find yourself better than other people."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Self Esteem"

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