How to Stop Comparing Yourself to People Online

Eight minutes on your phone in a queue. You were not looking for anything. You come out of it slightly worse than you went in — not upset, just diminished, as though something has been quietly taken off the top of the day.

Nothing bad happened in those eight minutes. You did not read an insult. You looked at a series of other people doing well, and a small internal number went down.

This is a measurement problem

To know where you are, you need something to measure against that is not itself moving. Position, in any real sense, is always position relative to a reference point. This is why a ship takes its bearing from a lighthouse and not from another ship.

Comparison online fails for two reasons at once, and it is worth separating them.

The first is the famous one: you are comparing your inside to other people's outside. Their result against your process, their announcement against your ordinary Tuesday. That is a genuine distortion, and everybody knows about it, and knowing about it helps surprisingly little.

The second is the one that actually does the damage. The reference point moves. Not occasionally — continuously, with every refresh, because the feed is assembled fresh each time from whoever is doing notably well at this moment. You are taking a bearing from another ship, and then from a different ship, and then from a third. No sequence of readings taken that way can ever settle. It is not that the news is bad. It is that there is no news that would be enough.

What a fixed reference feels like

The book's central image is a centre of gravity that does not move: something you can measure yourself against that is not a person, not a number, and not subject to how well anyone else's month is going.

In practice it is usually a sentence about who you are being, rather than what you are achieving. I am steady, and I do careful work, and I am not in a hurry. It sounds almost too plain to be useful. Its whole value is in the fact that nothing anyone posts can move it.

Achievements cannot do this job, because achievements are positions on a scale, and every scale has people further along it. Neither can any amount of reassurance, which is why compliments are pleasant for an hour and then stop working. Only something that is not a comparison at all can act as a fixed point.

Three things that actually reduce it

Compare to your own last month, on purpose. The one comparison that carries real information is you against you. Once a month, write down what is different from four weeks ago. This is not a positivity exercise; it is simply the only measurement with a stable reference in it.

Change the input, not just the attitude. Nobody talks themselves out of a feed engineered to produce exactly this feeling. Unfollow the accounts that reliably leave you smaller — not because they are bad, but because a lighthouse that moves is of no use to you. And notice the times of day it lands hardest. Tired, late, horizontal: the reading is worst precisely when it is least reliable.

Name the theft. When the feeling comes, say what it actually is: my reference point just moved. That single sentence does more than any argument with yourself, because it puts the problem where it belongs — in the instrument, not in your worth.

The part people miss

Comparison is not vanity. It is an attempt to answer a real question: am I all right? Am I doing this life properly? The question deserves an answer. It simply cannot be answered by other people's highlights, and the more often you ask it there, the more thoroughly you train yourself that the answer lives outside you and has to be checked constantly.

Answering it inwardly is not arrogance either. It is just repairing the instrument, so that when you do look at what others are doing, you can be genuinely pleased for them — which is, in the end, the only enjoyable way to look at it.

Try this

Write one sentence about who you are being, with no achievement in it, and keep it where you will see it in the morning. For the next week, whenever the feed leaves you smaller, read the sentence instead of arguing with the feeling. At the end of the week, write what is different from a month ago.

This essay draws on Chapter 2 of The Inward Singularity, "The Unshakeable Centre", which is free to read on this site.