Chapter 17: The Life You Think Everyone Else Is Living

Bea was on the couch, with her phone, when she saw that Mira had gotten engaged.

It was a beautiful photograph: a sunlit terrace, a ring, two radiant faces. Mira had been promoted in the spring. She had bought an apartment in the summer. In between, there had been a series of photographs from places Bea had never been. Mira looked, in every frame, luminous and unburdened.

Bea set the phone down and looked around her own living room. She was thirty-two. She had a job she tolerated, a rented apartment, and a relationship that was, at best, undecided. She felt something sink, a quiet sort of defeat. Everyone is moving forward except me. I’m falling behind in a race that everyone else seems to know the rules of.

She picked up the phone again and kept scrolling. A friend’s baby. A colleague’s marathon. An old classmate’s new business. Each image was small and cheerful, and each one added a pebble to the pile.

Two weeks later, she met Mira for coffee. Mira arrived late and tired, ordered a tea, and then, to Bea’s astonishment, began to cry.

“I don’t know how to tell people,” Mira said. “The engagement feels like everything is falling apart. The promotion has been awful, the new boss is impossible. The apartment is costing us far more than we can afford. I’ve been so anxious I can’t sleep. And everyone keeps telling me how perfect my life looks.”

Bea sat very still. For two weeks she had been comparing the inside of her life with the outside of Mira’s. And she realized, with a rush of something between shock and tenderness, that she had been doing it to everyone.

Why we compare

In 1954, the psychologist Leon Festinger proposed a theory of social comparison: that human beings have a drive to evaluate themselves, and, in the absence of objective measures, they do it by comparing themselves with others. We do it automatically. It is how we figure out whether we are doing well, whether our salary is fair, whether our worries are normal.

Comparison can be useful. Looking at someone slightly ahead of us can inspire and teach. But when we compare in an upward direction, to people who seem to have more, achieve more, or suffer less, and when we do it with partial information, it often leaves us feeling smaller.

The highlight reel and the behind-the-scenes

The core problem with comparison is that we are comparing different kinds of data. What we see of other people is the visible part: the announcements, the photographs, the polished stories. What we know of ourselves is everything, including the doubts, the bad days, and the uncertainties that nobody posts.

In 2011, the psychologist Alexander Jordan and colleagues published a set of studies showing that people systematically overestimate how often others experience positive emotions and underestimate how often others experience negative ones, particularly the private ones like loneliness, anxiety, and shame. The authors suggested that this is partly because negative emotions are more hidden. The result is a distorted picture: a world of people who seem to be doing better than we are, because we are comparing their public faces with our private selves. None of this means that everyone else is secretly unhappy. It means that what we see of other lives is always partial, and that partial information is a poor basis for judging a whole life.

Social media sharpens this. A growing body of research has looked at its effects on well-being, and the results are more mixed than headlines suggest. The effects on average appear small, and they depend heavily on how people use these platforms. Some studies, such as work by Philippe Verduyn and colleagues, have found that passive use, scrolling and watching without interacting, is more strongly linked with lower mood than active use, such as messaging and commenting. If scrolling leaves you feeling worse, you are not being oversensitive. You may simply be using the tool in the way that hurts most.

Whose timeline is it?

Many comparisons are really comparisons of timelines. By thirty, we are supposed to have a certain career. By thirty-five, a certain home. The psychologist Bernice Neugarten described what she called the social clock, the set of cultural expectations about when life events should occur. When we feel “behind,” it is often this internal clock that is ringing, not any evidence about our actual lives. The pressure is not confined to screens. A relative asking at a family gathering when you will marry, a community that expects a certain kind of career, or a childhood friend’s milestone can set the clock just as firmly.

But no two lives share a timeline. Some people marry at twenty-two and others at fifty-two. Some find their vocation young, others in their fifties. The person who seems to be ahead of you on one dimension is usually behind on others that you cannot see. And the very idea of a single race, with a single course, is more of an assumption than a fact.

Measuring yourself by your own yardstick

The antidote to unhelpful comparison is not to stop noticing other people, which is impossible. It is to have a yardstick of your own: a handful of measures of a good life that come from your values rather than from other people’s highlight reels.

What matters to you? Perhaps it is being a present parent, or building something you are proud of, or being financially steady, or making time for friends, or learning, or health, or creativity, or kindness. These are the dimensions on which your progress can actually be measured. Your yardstick will be different from Mira’s. That is the point.

You can also compare yourself to the most informative person of all: the version of you from a year ago. Are you a little wiser? A little more at ease? More skilled? That is the progress that counts, and it is the only comparison where you have all the data.

Try this: Name your trigger, choose your yardstick

1. Identify one comparison trigger. Where do you tend to compare yourself and feel worse? A particular account, a particular person, a particular topic (money, appearance, achievement, relationships)?

1. Name the feeling and the story. When I see ___, I feel ___, and I tell myself ___. For Bea: When I see Mira’s engagement, I feel behind, and I tell myself that everyone else has figured it out.

1. Choose a yardstick. Write down two or three measures of progress that are meaningful to you. Am I spending time with people I love? Am I learning something that interests me? Do I feel more settled than I did last year?

1. Make one practical change. Mute or unfollow an account that reliably leaves you deflated. Set a time limit for scrolling. Replace some passive viewing with active contact: send one message, ask one real question.

1. Ask a real question. The next time someone appears to have a perfect life, ask them about it, sincerely. You will often learn something that makes comparison seem silly.

Bea muted six accounts and reduced her scrolling to twenty minutes a day. She wrote her yardstick on an index card: friends, learning, steadiness. In the following months, she signed up for a pottery class, a thing she had wanted to try for years, and began meeting Mira every other Thursday for tea. They talked frankly. Bea found that the friendship, with the polish removed, was far better than the photographs had suggested.

A fair expectation. Comparison is automatic, so do not aim to stop noticing other people. Aim to notice sooner and return to your own yardstick. Muting accounts may feel petty; judge it by how you feel after a week. If comparison is tied to body image or to a pervasive sense of worthlessness, consider speaking with a professional.

A THOUGHT TO CARRY

Compare your whole life to your own yardstick, not your private life to someone else’s public one.