Why Do You Compare Yourself to Others?
Everyone does it. The question is what you do with the answer.
Comparing yourself to other people is not a modern weakness; it is how humans work out where they stand on anything that has no objective measure. There is no ruler for whether you are doing well at your job, at being a parent, at your own life, so you use the nearest available instrument, which is everyone else. Some people do this far more than others - it behaves like a stable trait - and the same habit produces completely different results depending on who you pick and what you take from it.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Answer about how you usually are, not about a bad week. Scoring high here is common and is not the same as being envious.
What it measures
The two halves of comparison orientation - checking how you are doing, and checking what to think - plus the direction you look in. The first two are how much you compare. The third is the one that decides whether it costs you anything.
Based on: Social comparison orientation (Gibbons & Buunk, 1999)
Possible results
Checking where you stand
Comparing what you have done and achieved.
Checking what to think
Using other people to work out your own view.
Looking upward
Comparing with people who are ahead, and what it leaves behind.
Common questions
How do I stop comparing myself to other people?
You probably do not, and aiming at that is most of why the attempt fails. Comparison is the mechanism humans use to locate themselves on anything without an objective measure, and it runs automatically. What can change is the third bar - who you compare with and what you conclude. Two specific moves do most of the work: comparing with people whose full circumstances you actually know, and treating someone ahead of you as evidence about what is possible rather than as a scoreboard.
Is comparison ever good for you?
Yes, and the condition is fairly precise: upward comparison lifts people when the person ahead seems reachable, and flattens them when they do not. The same photograph of the same success can do either, depending on whether you can see a path. That is also the most useful thing to notice in the moment - not whether you should be comparing, but whether the comparison you just made came with a next step or only with a verdict.
Why is social media so much worse for this?
Because of what they select for. An ordinary day gives you a handful of comparisons, most of them with people whose difficulties you also know about. A feed gives you hundreds, all of them edited, all of them upward by construction, and with none of the context that would make the comparison honest. The research points at the passive part specifically - reading without interacting is what tracks with feeling worse, and posting and messaging do not show the same pattern.
Sources
- Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations.
- Gibbons, F. X., & Buunk, B. P. (1999). Individual differences in social comparison: Development of a scale of social comparison orientation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
- Verduyn, P., Ybarra, O., Résibois, M., Jonides, J., & Kross, E. (2017). Do social network sites enhance or undermine subjective well-being? A critical review. Social Issues and Policy Review.
An honest note This is a short adaptation of a real scale rather than the scale itself. The measure it draws on has two subscales - comparing abilities and comparing opinions - and those are the first two bars. The third is not part of that scale: direction of comparison is studied separately, and it is included here because it is the part that determines whether any of this costs you anything. Two limits. The link between comparison and feeling worse is correlational, and it runs in both directions - feeling low makes people compare upward more, as well as the other way round, so a high third bar may be describing a mood rather than causing one. And this is a trait measure taken at one moment: comparison rises sharply during periods of transition, so a result taken in a month of upheaval will read higher than the same person's ordinary level.