Should we ever compare ourselves with others?
The costs and necessities of looking at other lives
Like most people, I spend part of every day on social media. I try to be mindful about it, but still fall into the loop of refreshing my feeds for a dopamine hit that rarely becomes anything meaningful. I’m not one to preach total disconnection; I enjoy and depend on what many of these platforms make possible. But it’s worth knowing that one of the main problems with platforms like Instagram and TikTok has a technical name and decades of research behind it: upward social comparison.
Leon Festinger, an American social psychologist, described the basic mechanism in his 1954 paper A Theory of Social Comparison Processes: we evaluate ourselves by measuring against others. When that measurement runs upward, toward someone we perceive as “better”, more successful, or more attractive, the emotional cost is real. A 2023 meta-analysis, for example, found that exposure to upward comparison content on social media is consistently associated with worse body image, subjective well-being, mental health, and self-esteem. Social media pushes us, in an attempt to feel enough, to confuse everything we see online with what we should unquestionably become. We start craving extraordinary lives, viral moments, specialness… usually without a meaningful reason behind it. We’re probably all aware of this in one way or another, just as we know that this chase doesn’t bring us closer to what we actually want. But it's hard to challenge this tendency in an interconnected world, a tendency that can distort our own definition of success and self-worth.
In other words, social media tends to foster the kind of comparisons that hurt more than help. But this doesn’t mean that we must avoid comparing ourselves to others at all costs. The psychologist Stuart Albert proposed the concept of temporal comparison in 1977 as a parallel process to social comparison. Other studies, such as Wilson and Ross (2000), suggest that we lean on comparisons with our past self as much as or even more than with others, and that this kind of comparison often becomes self-enhancing when we notice growth over time. Before any study proved it, the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius had a similar intuition in the Meditations (Book IV): how much trouble a person avoids by refusing to look at what their neighbor says or does, attending only to their own conduct. The psychologist Jordan Peterson repackaged a similar idea for a wide audience in his bestseller 12 Rules for Life: “compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.” The philosophical and empirical roots run deep, and the case for knowing how and when to compare with others has probably never been clearer in the age of social media.
So, the argument is not for self-absorption, or for ignoring outside judgment. Social comparison is quite useful: it helps us calibrate, learn, adapt, and grow. But it can't be our only reference, and it certainly can't be an arbitrary process dictated by our algorithms. The healthier question isn’t whether to compare, but with whom, when, and how. Comparing sideways, against curated lives we’ll never fully see, leaves us emptier the more we look. Comparing backward, against who we were a year or five years ago, tends to have the opposite effect. The same goes for comparing with people who genuinely inspire us. Most of us already know which of the two we do more often. Also, as a small antidote to the less ideal kind of comparison, let's not forget about the ordinary: the quotidian, the slow, the boring, the things within arm’s length, the “doing nothing for a while”. This is where almost everything that actually matters happens.
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