Why Do I Compare Myself to Other People?
Comparing is how people work out where they stand. It becomes corrosive when you are measuring your whole life against a fragment of somebody else's.
You compare because it is one of the few ways a person has of judging how they are doing. There is no absolute scale for a life, so you look sideways.
That is not a fault to be cured. The problem is not the comparing. It is that the comparison is almost always made against the wrong thing, using a measure you did not choose, with almost none of the information you would need for the judgement to mean anything.
So the useful questions are not how do I stop. They are: whose definition am I using, what can I actually see and is what I am doing giving me information or quietly removing me from my own life.
Whose definition are you measuring against
Every comparison contains a hidden standard. When you feel behind, you are behind according to something, and it is worth naming what.
Sometimes it is a parent's idea of a respectable life. Sometimes it is the standard of the town you grew up in, or the standard of the industry you happened to enter at twenty three. Sometimes it belongs to a friendship group formed years ago whose measures never updated.
Write the standard down as a sentence: by this age a person should have. Then ask a plain question about it. Do I believe that, or did I simply never examine it? A surprising number of people discover they have spent a decade losing a competition they never entered.
What a visible life cannot tell you
You compare your inside to their outside. That line is familiar to the point of being worn out, and it is still the mechanism.
What is visible is a house, a title, a holiday, a wedding, a child's exam result, a tone of voice at a party. What is not visible is what any of it cost, who is paying for it, what was inherited, what was given up, what is being held together and how the person feels at four in the morning.
This is not an argument that everyone is secretly miserable, which is just as false and rather mean. Plenty of people are doing well. The point is narrower. You are drawing conclusions from a fragment, and the fragment does not contain the information you are treating it as containing.
Their life is rooted in a life you did not live
A person is grown from what they began with. Where they were born, what money was around, what they were told they were, who taught them to speak in rooms like that, what illness or luck arrived and when.
Two people can stand in the same room at forty having travelled distances that are not remotely comparable. One walked ten miles downhill. The other climbed two and is exhausted, and by the visible measure the first is ahead.
You do not know what somebody started with, so a straight comparison of positions is a comparison of the wrong quantity. The only version that has any meaning is a comparison with your own earlier position, and even that needs honesty about the years you were carrying something.
Information or self erasure
Comparison can be genuinely useful. Seeing somebody do a thing you thought impossible tells you it is possible. Noticing that a colleague negotiates and you do not is information you can act on. Watching how someone handles their father tells you something worth learning.
The test is what you are left with afterwards. Useful comparison leaves you with a specific next step. Corrosive comparison leaves you with a smaller opinion of yourself and nothing to do about it.
There is a stronger version worth naming. Sometimes the comparison does not just discourage you, it replaces you. You begin wanting their life in detail, and the thing you actually wanted disappears from view. That is self erasure, and it takes longer to notice because it feels like ambition.
The feeds are the amplifier, not the cause
It is true that scrolling makes this worse. Feeds are built from the most presentable minute of many lives at once, delivered at the hour you are most tired.
But cutting your phone use is a volume control rather than an answer. People compared painfully long before any of this, at school gates, at funerals and across dinner tables. If the underlying measure is somebody else's, you will find something to lose against with or without a screen.
By all means reduce the input if it helps. Just do not mistake the quiet that follows for having settled anything.
So what
The practical move is not to stop noticing other people. It is to know what you are measuring, and to have a measure of your own to put beside it.
That means being able to say what you want your life to contain, in plain terms, without reference to anyone else. Most people cannot do this quickly, which is exactly why the borrowed standard keeps winning. It is at least specific.
It is also possible to do this work and find you are content, and that what looked like envy was admiration with nothing wrong underneath it. That counts as an answer.
A short exercise: three comparisons
Half an hour on paper. Pick three people you have compared yourself with in the last month, including one you would rather not admit to.
- 1For each, write exactly what you are comparing. Not them in general. The specific thing.
- 2Write the standard that comparison assumes, in one sentence beginning: a person should.
- 3Write where that standard came from and whether you would choose it today.
- 4Write what you can actually see of their life and what you are inferring without evidence.
- 5For each, write either the one specific thing it tells you to do or the words nothing to do here, which are a legitimate outcome.
By the end you usually find one comparison that is genuinely informative and two that are borrowed standards doing damage. Knowing which is which is most of the work.
Three shapes this takes
Composites. Notice the shape rather than the detail.
The friend from the same starting line
The comparison stings because the starting positions looked identical. They rarely were. What is usually being measured is speed, and speed is a poor measure of a life when the routes were different.
The younger person doing well
Age is one of the most borrowed standards there is, and it is almost never examined. Under it there is usually a specific fear about time running out, and that fear is worth taking seriously on its own terms rather than through somebody else's career.
The comparison that is really about being chosen
Sometimes the subject is not the house or the job at all. It is the sense of being overlooked. That is a real thing to want and it is worth saying so plainly, because it cannot be satisfied by matching anybody's possessions.
Where the book comes in
The Alternative Is Unthinkable is largely about borrowed definitions. What success was decided to be, who decided it and what a life costs when it is spent meeting a standard nobody ever agreed to out loud.
It is not a programme for confidence and it does not tell you to want less. It is a way of working out what your own measure actually is.
Also here