Comparison Traps
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The problem is rarely social media itself — It is the way we use it, and the way it invites us to define our own lives through the curated highlight reels of everyone else’s.
Comparison rewrites your own definitions — The more we measure our happiness, success, and worth against what we see, the further we drift from the definitions that would actually be ours.
Scrolling can become a form of avoidance — Watching other lives unfold is often easier than sitting still with our own, and the ease of it can quietly cost us the examination of what our lives are asking from us.
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“When you’re learning, or trying new things, you’re going to make mistakes. The trick is to try to fail in a way that gives you useful information. This week, we revisit a favorite conversation with Amy Edmondson to discuss the difference between constructive failures and those we should try to avoid.”
Click here to listen to an episode from the Hidden Brain Podcast featuring Amy Edmondson (The author of one of my personal favorite reads, The Fearless Organization)
Scroll, Scroll, Scroll — Repeat
You open your app of choice and within ten minutes, an hour, or somewhere in between you notice that your inner state has shifted. At times, there is a low grade sense of being slightly less at ease with your own life than you were before you started scrolling.
This is not a post against social media. Social media is genuinely helpful. It keeps us connected to people we love, builds businesses and careers, and offers up community, learning, art, and moments of real inspiration. Naming a shadow does not require rejecting its light.
What we are discussing today is the psychological cost of one particular pattern — measuring our lives against what we see and discussing the way this act moves us away from the internally derived sense of happiness, contentment, and fulfillment that we are actually reaching for. Today, we observe how the daily scroll may be shaping your inner definitions of a life worth living, and consider what is possible when we reclaim agency over these definitions.
When we compare
To understand why scrolling can leave us feeling subtly diminished, we can explore the psychology of comparison itself.
Social Psychologist Leon Festinger, whose work I referenced when discussing cognitive dissonance, also developed Social Comparison Theory. The central insight was that human beings have an innate drive to evaluate themselves, and in the absence of objective measures, we do so by comparing ourselves to others. Festinger delineates between two types of comparison, upward (referencing those who we feel are better off) and downward (referencing those who we feel are worse off). While both create temporary emotional shifts, neither reliably leads to genuine well being.
Social media becomes particularly consequential when we observe the comparison pool. In everyday life, our comparison pool is naturally limited — leaving our comparisons to a handful of coworkers, friends, or neighbors. This is a pool that we have greater access to and meaning their texture is more fleshed out — we see their struggles as well as successes. In contrast, social media gives us exposure to hundreds of thousands of curated presentations per day, most of them representing peak moments as opposed to everyday reality. This pool is vast, algorithmically amplified, and heavily skewed towards the aspirational. The human system was never meant for this volume of stimulation so there is no surprise that for some of us, our interactions are costing us something.
Ok, now here is something interesting — The Hedonic Treadmill. Asserted by researchers Brickman and Campbell this concept explains that we as people tend to return to a baseline of happiness regardless of what happens externally. This is valuable within the context of social media comparison because it brings the following question to the surface: “If you scrolled and saw the version of life someone else was displaying and decided that replicating this would make you happy, once achieved, wouldn’t you just decide that a new marker of your happiness has been erected?”
Maybe you already see these aspects in your life as:
A recurring sense that if you just had what someone else has, you would finally feel satisfied
A subtle shift in your goals after time on social media, in ways that do not match your actual values
A creeping dissatisfaction with parts of your life that were, until recently, sources of genuine contentment
What are you escaping?
Is scrolling avoidance? Maybe. In another post on rushing, we explored the concept of emotional and spiritual bypassing — the ways we sidestep difficult emotional material by keeping busy, staying positive, or intellectualizing.
At times passive scrolling (or doomscrolling as it is sometime referenced) is a form of this avoidance. It is far easier to watch other people build the lives they desire than to sit and consider the honest state of your own. This is valuable to be named because discovering the truth of avoidance is very useful information. What we look away from often holds the very material that would allow us to move forward, while scrolling passively takes us away from moments of self inquiry that would return us to our own definitions of a life worth living.
Shifting Definitions
What used to feel like enough can begin to feel small as our internal compass is re-calibrated towards every image, post, story, and reel that passes through our attention. At times, we might even experience a subtle abandonment of the definitions we once trusted in favor of the ones that are performing well in your feed. The work is to bring light back to your own internal sense of alignment and value, continually.
Off The Page: Actioning The Insights
Cultivating awareness
Your practice this week
This week, your practice is to bring awareness to your relationship with comparison. To begin to distinguish between the goals that are genuinely yours and the ones you have absorbed, often without noticing. Take a look at the reflection questions and strategies this week and notate what insights show up for you.
Reflection Questions:
How do you feel, honestly, after time on social media?
When you scroll, what (if anything) might you be avoiding?
What in your life would you appreciate more deeply if you were not comparing it to something or someone else?
Strategies:
Take inventory of the state you are in when you reach for the scroll
Before you open the app this week, pause for a single breath and notice what is happening internally. Are you tired? restless? avoidant? genuinely wanting to connect? Simply explore your true motivations through introspection and notate what arises.
Track how you feel afterwards, without judgment
After time on social media this week, take 30 seconds to notice any shifts in your internal state. Are you inspired? depleted? comparing? You are gathering data about how patterns impact you — which is the only ground on which sustainable change can be built, if desired.
Write down your own definitions (don’t just think about them intentionally — actually write them down)
Find space this week to write for 10 minutes or less. In your own words, define what happiness, contentment, and fulfillment actually look like for you. Truly your own definitions. If you desire, place this document in a place that you can continually reference and adjust as your own personal reflections begin to naturally develop. The most reliable protection against absorbing other people’s definitions is having a clear, articulated version of your own.
The life you are cultivating does not need to look like anyone else’s to be worth building. When you release the pressure of external measurement, what you often will discover is not a smaller life, but a truer one.
Thank You
Thank you for joining me this week! I’m excited to keep sharing insights from my work, research, and personal journey with you.
Did something resonate with you? Curious about applying these strategies in your life? Or know someone who might benefit?
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● New Reads in The Library
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A Listen for the Week
As I continue to consume relevant content, I will share it here to deepen knowledge, perspective, and inquiry on a variety of topics related to wellness. This week I am sharing an episode from the Hidden Brain podcast.
Making the Most of your Mistakes
“When you’re learning, or trying new things, you’re going to make mistakes. The trick is to try to fail in a way that gives you useful information. This week, we revisit a favorite conversation with Amy Edmondson to discuss the difference between constructive failures and those we should try to avoid.”
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