“Size” only does so much in the world of art. It’s there, for sure! Pink Floyd’s “Shine On You Crazy Diamonds (Pts. 1-5)” is much longer (at over 13 minutes) than Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop” (barely 2 minutes). But no reasonable person with even a slight modicum of musical taste would say that the “size difference” between those two songs is the main difference. You could and would easily name upwards of a dozen other qualitative musical differences before you got to size, and even then size would largely be a byproduct of the previously mentioned qualitative differences.
In other words there is something–many somethings–inherently different between the late classic rock of the British Pink Floyd and the early punk of the American Ramones. Despite those songs being released within a year of each other, they are operate artistically on completely different levels, and to compare them using the category “size” is nearly nonsensical.
This is all a very roundabout way of getting at the fact that the way we tend to compare our human lives is completely absurd. The reason comparison is the thief of joy is not so much because comparison is in itself inherently evil, but because the way we do the comparing is largely along the lines of “the main difference between Pink Floyd and Ramones is the former makes 13 minute songs and the latter makes two minute songs.”
Our lives are art. And what makes art good is not size, but beauty.
Meaningful Returns 