Comparing yourself to others: why everyone looks better

On Sunday night Rachel gets into bed and opens LinkedIn. Within three minutes she has scrolled past a classmate from her year in a new role, a former colleague announcing a promotion, and someone she knows from a conference thanking the team for a record quarter. The screen goes dark and leaves behind the feeling that she has achieved nothing whatsoever in the past twelve months.

She has in fact achieved plenty. She finished a project that a year earlier looked well beyond her, and she trained two new people so thoroughly that they now run without her. None of that photographs well, though, and nobody posts congratulations underneath it.

Comparing is how we take our own measurements

Leon Festinger described something in 1954 that has held up ever since: a person needs to know where they stand with their abilities and their opinions, and when no objective yardstick exists, they reach for the people around them. A stopwatch will tell you how far you run in an hour. Whether you are a good colleague, a good parent or good at your profession, no stopwatch will say.

So you compare, even after resolving to stop. This is not weakness of character or a shortage of confidence but a default setting that switches itself on without asking permission. Festinger noticed one more thing: we do not measure ourselves against just anybody. We reach by preference for people who resemble us, meaning the same field, a comparable start, a similar age.

That explains an odd effect. News about a billionaire unsettles almost nobody, while a promotion in the next department can ruin an entire week. The more similar the other person is, the more sharply the comparison cuts, because the gap cannot be waved away by saying you play in different leagues.

The question, then, is not whether to compare. It is who with, and by what measure.

Upward or downward

Psychology distinguishes two directions. Upward comparison points at someone who, in your view, has it better. Downward comparison points at someone who is doing worse. Thomas Wills described in 1981 that we reach for the second kind mainly at moments when we have been hurt somehow or something has gone wrong. Looking at a person who is worse off brings relief in the short term.

Neither direction is good or bad in itself. What decides is what you carry away from it.

Daniel sits next to a colleague who writes cleaner code and takes away one specific thing he can learn in two evenings. The same comparison flattens him the moment he reads a verdict instead of a skill: he has got it in him, I have not, and that settles it. The input is identical in both cases. All that differs is what the head does with it.

Whether an upward comparison lifts you or knocks you flat can be predicted rather well in advance. Penelope Lockwood and Ziva Kunda showed in 1997 that a stellar role model motivates only as long as their level feels attainable. The moment the same story reads as out of reach, inspiration turns into evidence of your own inadequacy. What decides is not the size of the gap but whether you see a route between yourself and the other person, or a chasm.

The line between a useful comparison and a destructive one therefore does not run through the person you pick. It runs through whether you are measuring a skill or the worth of a human being.

Stage versus backstage

The second trap sits in the data you are working with. About yourself you know absolutely everything: how many times you rewrote it, where you panicked, how long you put off the phone call and which parts of that project went badly. About the other person you see the finished result and one sentence they wrote about it themselves.

You are comparing your backstage with somebody else's stage. This is not pessimism or low self-esteem, just lopsided access to information.

How lopsided it is was shown by Alexander Jordan and his colleagues in 2011. They asked students to estimate how often their peers went through unpleasant things: loneliness, failing an exam, the sense of not coping. The estimates came out systematically low, while the pleasant experiences of others were overshot. The study carries a title that sums this up better than a whole paragraph: misery has more company than people think.

Which means the error is not in your performance but in your reading of the room. Most of the people around you have a week behind them that they are not proud of, and just like you, they wrote nothing about it.

When a comparison turns into evidence about you

One person takes a note away from somebody else's success. Another takes away confirmation that they have no business being where they are. That second way of reading is exactly what sits behind impostor syndrome: the success is there, the certainty is not, and every capable person in the room is one more piece of evidence for the prosecution.

Self-doubt does not have a single source, though. For one person it runs mostly on feeling like a fraud, the quiet notion that the seat belongs to somebody more able. Another discounts their own results as a matter of routine and deletes praise before it can settle. And a third sees luck and circumstance behind everything, so not one good result ever ends up in their own column. Comparison feeds all three sources, just in a slightly different way each time.

The most awkward part is that you make the environment harder for yourself precisely by choosing well. Herbert Marsh showed repeatedly in the 1980s that a pupil with the same abilities thinks less of themselves in a selective school than in an average one. Their results did not change; the people around them did. The same mechanics work in a top team, at a good conference and in a field you got into through a hard filter.

How all this connects to who gets credited with a success is unpacked in more detail by the piece on whether a result comes down to success or luck. It is also worth knowing that self-assessment fails at both ends: the beginner overrates himself, the experienced person often underrates herself, because she already senses how much she does not know. What the data actually says about that, and what the internet has added on top, is described in the piece on how the Dunning-Kruger effect really works.

Feeds: what is known and what is merely repeated

The sentence "social media is to blame" gets repeated so often that it has hardened into a rule. Research is more cautious. Work from the past decade fairly consistently finds an association between how you spend time on these platforms and your mood, but it is an association rather than a proven cause, and smaller than the headlines suggest.

More interesting than total time is the manner of use. A difference keeps showing up between passively scrolling other people's profiles and making actual contact, meaning writing, commenting, arranging to meet. The first mode is a pure delivery service of stages without backstages. The second at least stands a chance of ending in a conversation where you find out how it really went for that person.

Feeds also change the makeup of the comparison group. People used to measure themselves against the neighbours and the office; today you carry the best moments of several hundred people in your pocket, including some you have not seen in two years.

The practical consequence is duller than a ban. You do not have to delete accounts. It is enough to watch which mode you are in and for how long. Rachel from the opening did not have a problem with LinkedIn; she had a problem with opening it exclusively on Sunday night, when she was least resilient and most tired.

How to compare so that it is worth something

The advice to stop comparing yourself fails for the same reason as the advice not to think about a white bear. More usable is changing three things: who with, on what, and against what.

Specific moves you can try this week:

• Measure one skill, not a whole human being. Instead of "she is better than me", try the sentence "what exactly does she do differently when she writes a proposal".
• Let your main reference point be your own version from a year ago. That one has an enormous advantage: you know its backstage.
• When a comparison flattens you, go and get the missing data. Ask the person how long it took them and what they got wrong along the way. The answer is usually a surprise.
• Name what you read out of the gap. Information ("I cannot negotiate on price") is something you can act on; a verdict ("I am not good enough") is not.
• Watch when you compare. Most people do it tired, in the evening and in bed, which is the worst imaginable moment for assessing your own life.

Try to recall the last comparison that genuinely flattened you. Was it about a specific skill the other person has and you do not yet? Or about the sense that they are simply a better human being? The answer to that question will tell you more about your relationship with yourself than any ranking of colleagues.

If you want to know where exactly your doubts are rooted, work through the short Impostor Syndrome Test. It shows the overall level of doubt and its main source, so you can tell whether other people's successes confirm a fear of being found out or a habit of erasing your own results. The comparison with other people it offers is approximate and nothing more.

The week you write down names

Try one exercise for seven days that takes a minute a day. Every time somebody's success gives you a jab in the ribs during the day, put a name into your phone and one word for what it was about. Do not evaluate anything else.

After a week, look at the list. For most people it turns out to circle round two or three names and one single area. The rest of the world leaves them perfectly calm.

That list is more usable than any resolution to stop comparing. It shows rather precisely what you care about and where you feel least secure. Those are two pieces of information that Sunday night scrolling cannot give you.