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You're Comparing Yourself To A Person Who Doesn't Exist

September 7, 2026 #journal #social-media #psychology #essays
Budding
Table of Contents

It takes about ten minutes of scrolling to feel like you’ve wasted ten years.

Last night, roughly in order: a guy who swims across open water for fun, someone finishing a PhD at 24, a founder announcing a raise, a couple living in Lisbon who don’t appear to work, and a man doing muscle-ups on a beach at sunrise.

Five people. My brain filed them as one.

That person doesn’t exist. I went to bed feeling behind him anyway.

Part 1 was about why social media fills up with other people’s achievements, and why that’s a design problem rather than a you problem. This one’s about what those wins do once they’re stacked, and what actually helps.

Nobody’s good at more than about two things

Obvious. Also completely stops being obvious the moment you’re scrolling.

The open-water swimmer has spent fifteen years in cold water. That’s where the hours went. He’s probably not also a great cook, or the person you call at 3am, or someone with savings.

The PhD gave up their twenties. The founder has a company and often not much else — no weekends, a relationship under strain, a body he’s spending. The couple in Lisbon are either burning savings or about to sell you a course.

Everyone you admire is a trade. They got the thing by not getting other things.

You know this about yourself! You know exactly what your one good thing cost you, because you’re the one who paid. What you never get to see is anyone else’s receipt.

Your feed shows you the peak and hides the receipt

So here’s what the scroll is actually doing to you.

It takes the highest point of one person’s life, then the highest point of someone else’s, then someone else’s, and plays them at you back to back with nothing in between. No commute. No bad year. No admin. No waiting around.

Your brain isn’t built to keep these filed separately. It runs its usual shortcut: whatever’s easiest to picture becomes what you think normal looks like. And after twenty minutes on your phone, the easiest thing to picture is other people at their absolute best.

So you’re not comparing yourself to the swimmer. You’re comparing yourself to a thing that swims like him, earns like the founder, has the PhD, and gets up at 5am. Every individual part is real. The creature itself has never existed and can’t.

And you lose to it. Obviously you lose to it — it was assembled specifically out of the people who beat you.

Tap through and watch it get built.

Ten minutes of scrolling

Tap through the feed. Watch what your brain quietly keeps from each one.

Who you're now measuring yourself against
    Nothing yet.

    Most of your happiness is just a comparison

    The reason this stings more than it should is that humans seem to run almost entirely on relative position, not absolute anything.

    In 2005 Erzo Luttmer published a paper with the great title Neighbors as Negatives. Controlling for your own income, your neighbours earning more predicts you reporting lower happiness. Not less money. Same money, worse feeling, purely because of who’s next door.

    There’s a 1998 survey that’s even more blunt, and you should answer it yourself before I tell you what happened.

    Pick one, honestly

    This is the actual question Solnick and Hemenway put to 257 people at Harvard School of Public Health in 1995. Prices are theirs. Answer before you scroll.

    👇 Tap the one you'd actually pick

    Solnick & Hemenway, "Is more always better? A survey on positional concerns", Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 1998.

    Half of a room of public health academics would rather be poorer as long as they were winning. That’s not them being broken. That’s the standard-issue machinery in all of us, showing up under lab conditions.

    Education research has a name for this — the big-fish-little-pond effect — and it’s one of the more replicated findings going (26 countries, plus a 2018 meta-analysis). Take two students with identical ability. Put one in a selective school and one in a normal school. The one in the selective school will rate their own ability lower. Same brain, same grades, worse self-concept, entirely because of the room.

    Anyone who went from top of their class in school to bottom half at uni has lived this. Nothing about you changed. The pond did.

    The pond used to be your village. Now it’s eight billion people.

    For basically all of human history your comparison group was a few hundred people, most of them doing roughly what you were doing. You could be the best carpenter anyone had ever met, and the existence of a better carpenter in Florence was simply not information you had access to.

    Now the pond is everyone, sorted by an algorithm that specifically surfaces the top of every field, delivered to your bed.

    Same you. Different pond.

    Say you're genuinely top 1% at your thing — better than 99 out of every 100 people. Now slide the size of the room you can see.

    1
    people ahead of you

    Just arithmetic — 1% of the group. Nothing about your ability changes as you drag this. The only thing changing is how many of them you can see.

    There’s a meta-analysis of experiments on this and it finds exactly what you’d guess: being shown upward comparison targets on social media causally worsens body image, self-esteem, wellbeing and mental health. Not “is correlated with.” Causally, under controlled conditions.

    Which is a genuinely mad sentence to write about something most of us do for four hours a day.

    The problem isn’t that you compare. It’s that your sample is garbage.

    I want to be careful here, because the standard advice is bad.

    Standard advice #1: stop comparing yourself to others. You won’t, and telling someone to stop running an involuntary process mostly just adds a layer of guilt on top.

    Standard advice #2: compare downward. Think about people who have it worse, feel better. My own instinct has always been this one — when I feel behind, I remind myself how much luckier I am than most people alive.

    I have to flag that this is shakier than it feels. It comes from Thomas Wills in 1981, and a bunch of later studies failed to reproduce his central claim. Worse: there’s evidence downward comparison lowers anxiety and lowers effort. It comforts you into stopping. (Nobody selling gratitude as a life hack mentions this bit.)

    So here’s the version I’ve landed on, which I think dodges both problems.

    Social media handed you a sample. That sample wasn’t random — it was selected, on purpose, for the top of every distribution. Nothing about you has to change for the sample to be wrong. It was already wrong before you looked at it.

    Fixing a sample isn’t a moral act. It’s not a comfort ranking and it’s not really a comparison at all. It’s arithmetic. You’re just asking where the distribution actually sits, because you got shown one tail of it and told it was the middle.

    So here’s the sample. Every dot is one person out of a representative thousand. Tap whatever’s been getting to you lately.

    1,000 people

    Every dot is one person, out of a representative thousand. Tap whatever your feed has been making you feel bad about.

    —
    Pick one above

    Every dot is a person.

    One at a time on purpose. These groups overlap, so multiplying them together would give you a number nobody has measured.

    A couple of those are worth saying out loud.

    “I’ve been to 30 countries” is being posted by a rounding error. About 11% of the world got on a plane at all in 2018, roughly 4% internationally. (You’ll see “80% of people have never flown” quoted everywhere — that one’s an estimate nobody actually measured, so don’t use it. The 11% is Gössling and Humpe, 2020.)

    $30 a day is the bit that got me. That’s around $11,000 a year, which is a tight budget in a rich country, and it puts you in the richest 15% of humanity. Half the world is living on under $10 a day.

    And for a sense of how skewed the top of these distributions is: 1% of people generate more than half of all aviation emissions. That’s the shape of the thing. The top is the only part you’ve been scrolling.

    None of this is meant to make you feel grateful on command. Gratitude stuff does have some support (Emmons and McCullough’s original work, a 2023 systematic review, a 2025 cross-cultural meta-analysis) but the effects are modest and mostly land on mood, which isn’t the same thing as fixing your read on reality.

    The point’s narrower than gratitude. You were shown a biased sample and you drew a conclusion from it. The conclusion is wrong. That’s it.

    Fix 2: post the receipts, not just the win

    You can also change what you’re putting in.

    Post the failure. The rejection, the year that went nowhere, the number that didn’t move. And engage with people who do the same — in an engagement system, attention is your only vote, and every reply you give an honest post is a tiny instruction to the machine.

    I won’t pretend this is free. Vulnerable posts get judged, and in my experience they also just do worse, which is the entire problem restated and the reason so few of them exist.

    But there’s a version that costs almost nothing, and I think it’s the one that actually matters.

    In Part 1 I wrote about a girl thanking a stranger for posting about studying abroad, because it showed her someone like her was allowed to do that. Aspirational posts aren’t the villain. For loads of people they’re the only way they ever find out what’s on the menu.

    The damage isn’t the achievement. It’s the achievement with the road deleted.

    So post the good news. Then post what it took. The rejections, the funding, the person who made an intro, the four years where nothing happened, the parents who covered rent. Same post, same reach, and suddenly it’s a map instead of a scoreboard.

    That’s not self-deprecation. You’re just leaving the receipts in.

    Fix 3: the apps could just… not do this

    Everything above is asking individuals to compensate for a system, which is a rubbish way to fix anything.

    The honest version: these products could be built differently and mostly aren’t, because the thing making you feel behind is the same thing making the money. Engagement isn’t a side effect of the design. It is the design.

    Not impossible though. Instagram spent two years trialling hidden like counts, then decided it helped some people and annoyed others and made it a toggle — which is what companies do when a change is good for users and bad for the metric. Hunt and colleagues ran a study at Penn where students capped at 10 minutes per platform per day showed real drops in loneliness and depression over three weeks. (Small study, one campus, undergrads — but the direction is clear enough.)

    And we already have proof that design changes behaviour, because it’s the exact thing from Part 1. If a reply layer can teach people to be crueller, a reply layer can teach people something else. The mechanism is neutral. The tuning isn’t.

    So the ask isn’t “make social media nice.” It’s narrower: rank for something other than time spent, show the path and not just the outcome, and stop treating the current setup like a law of physics when it’s a quarterly target.

    Where this leaves me

    I still post my wins. I’m going to keep posting my wins. I need the work, and pretending otherwise would make this a nicer essay and a dishonest one.

    What’s changed is smaller than a resolution. When I catch myself feeling behind now, I try to remember I’m not behind a person. I’m behind a creature glued together out of twenty people’s best days, by a system that gets paid when I lose to it.

    Doesn’t make the feeling go away. Does make it a fact about the machine instead of a fact about me.

    Which turns out to be the whole difference.

    Part 2 of two. Part 1 is Does Social Media Make Us Narcissistic?

    Sources