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You know, Drew, I think it's very appropriate we're doing this episode today. Why is that? A little ironic, actually. So I came into the office this morning, and for listeners who don't know, the podcasting data situation is a disaster. Yeah. It's like you would actually think for an industry that's exploding and growing so quickly, there would be a single dashboard somewhere that actually fucking measures who listens to a podcast.

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It does it accurately. But apparently that's a lot to ask. And so long story short, we came to this realization that our audience was not quite as big as we thought it was. It's still very big, to be clear. But, you know, it's not quite as big as we thought. And it's like instead of being one of the, I don't know, 50 biggest shows in the world, we're only like one of the 50.

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300 biggest shows in the world. But it was funny because I felt like I like spent a good five minutes talking you off a ledge. You did. You had to.

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I didn't even make this connection. Okay. Yep. You got me. It's such, but it's, by the way, I've been there many times over the years. And, uh, but it is such a, it's like such, um, it's such a ridiculous situation where it's like in your head, you're like, I thought we were as good as these other podcasts that were, uh, you know, in the top 10 and doing all these like winning awards and all this stuff. And it's like,

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oh, no, we're just we're only the tier below. Yeah. You know, we're only one of the 300 biggest shows of the world. And and then you get really bummed out about it and you start feeling very insignificant and inadequate. And just by that one little. And basically the the summary of this story is that being human sucks and it never stops. The comparisons never stop. And.

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And there's no end to it. And I think that's why this episode needs to be made is how do we wrestle with that? How do we cope with this fact? You know, like I would say one of the single most common questions or problems or emails that I have gotten throughout my career is essentially boils down to how do I stop worrying about what other people think? Or how do I stop comparing myself to the people around me? And –

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Of course, my answer is always you don't. You just change the nature of that comparison. You get better at managing those comparisons. And I guess we've already established two minutes into this episode that you and I are not immune to this as well. So we're all in the same boat, folks. And we're going to do our best to help us all row back to shore, so to speak. What say you? Yeah.

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It is ironic. No, it is ironic that that's how we started the day off today. So, but it's a very good example and can practice what we preach a little bit here. Yes. We are going to practice what we preach. For regular listeners, this is one of the mid-month episodes. So, this is going to be a shorter episode. You know, only two to three hours. Like, very light listening. Just a little mini episode for you. Yeah, just a little mini.

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Yeah, mini episode. There's only, you know, only like 80 citations in the guide. So this is an important topic. It's a very universal topic. And like I said, it's one that comes up all the time. You know, we just did our large episode on friendship a couple weeks ago. And then obviously a huge component of friendship or developing a social life is...

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Comparing yourself to others. Worrying about your status. Do people like you? Are you good enough? Are you what to do when you're rejected? So we're going to cover a lot of these topics in this episode. We're going to get a better understanding of why we seem doomed to compare ourselves to other people no matter what we do. How to manage those comparisons. How to make better comparisons. And then, of course, like –

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What is the psychological purpose behind these comparisons? Like anything, I think if there's one thing that regular listeners discover with us month after month, is that the things that cause us to suffer are actually quietly serving some sort of hidden psychological purpose. Yes. Like we can sit around and talk about how—

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shame fucks up our lives and ruins everything. But what we learned in that episode is that actually shame serves a very practical purpose. And, uh, turns out social comparison is no different. No different. Yeah. And for those of you who are new to the show,

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My name is Mark Manson. I'm three times number one New York Times bestselling author. Don't you forget it. You better compare yourself to me. God damn it. This is my co-host, producer, lead researcher, former academic Drew Burney. And in the soft podcast, our goal is to go so deep, be so thorough, over research everything so completely and

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That by the time you get to the end of the episode, this area of your life will be solved. So just a reminder, every episode of Solved comes with a free PDF companion guide. We have a full summary of the episode, cover everything that we talk about, give some practical takeaways and advice. And of course, show our work, give our citations, references, and follow-up reading. So if you want that, go to SolvedPodcast.com slash socialcomparison.

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How do we want to start this, Drew? Maybe with just a pretty simple question, like why do we measure ourselves against others? And why does it always kind of have a sting to it? Or does it always have to have a sting to it? I guess, too, is maybe the better question there.

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You know, we compare ourselves based on every like we find things. There's nothing you compare yourself to. You find something right. You're how much money you make, the partner you have, the house you live in, your bodies. We compare our bodies all the time. Now we follow our accounts or likes, whatever it is on social media. Yeah.

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Um, on the one hand, this can be a very motivating, uh, kind of emotional experience, right? Yeah. On the other hand, it can be, like I said, a very torment, tormenting experience as well. Right. What's weird too, is that even, even when we improve our situation, maybe we get a new job, we get a new partner, we get whatever that moment we get that, we look around at what everybody else has at that, has at that time. Right. Yeah.

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It's it's really relative. Like social comparison is always relative. I remember like my grandma, she was born in the 30s and so grew up through the depression and stuff like that. And she would always say, you know, I guess we were poor when I was young, but nobody knew it because everybody was around. Yeah. You know, like you compare yourself to everybody. Everybody was poor. We were fine. You know, that's that's where you get that.

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But there is, you know, there's research to show you make more money. Say you're making $70,000 a year. Sounds great. Unless, you know, your best friend's making 90, right? If they're making 50, then you feel a little bit better about yourself. Yeah. So this is all kind of relative. In the 1950s, and we'll get into more of this research too, but there was this guy, Leon Festinger.

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He developed what he called social comparison theory, okay, which basically described this whole phenomena, right? Like he described the tendency to compare ourselves to other people in relation to them. He described what we – some of the terms we're going to use through this upward comparison. It's like when you're looking up at somebody else who's doing better versus downward comparison, looking at somebody else who's worse off than you.

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Interestingly, each one of the, it doesn't like, if you're comparing upward, you're not always jealous. Sometimes you're like, oh, it's motivating and inspired. And sometimes when you're looking down at someone, you're not always like, you don't just feel bad for them. You feel better about yourself. Of course. Maybe too. Of course. It could also lead to kind of some stagnation where like, well, I'm not as bad off as them. So I don't really have to do anything. Yeah. So it's just, there's the human mind for you. Right. In a nutshell. It's like, we can, we can interpret anything any way we want. Can ruin anything. We can.

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The human mind can absolutely ruin anything. But, you know, there's other research that does show that it is important, though, because...

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If you chronically experience kind of these, you're one down all the time. If you interpret it that way, if you experience it that way, you're always kind of ranking lower than other people around you. I mean, that's linked to like stress disorders, more stress hormones, you have more inflammation, even to like biomarkers show that, higher risks for things like depression and anxiety.

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Even in clinical context, too, you see this. People with anxiety or depression usually have this very skewed way of comparing themselves to others in any other situation, usually leading to some sort of either desperation or just you're giving up because you don't see any point and you can't compete with the people around you. Right? So –

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This is a very, like, incredibly pervasive, incredibly common. We do it all the time. We just do it naturally. Yeah. Why do we do it that? Why? Why? Why? Why? Like, why do we have to torture ourselves like this so much? It's really a kind of wild question to even ask because it is so pervasive, right? Mm-hmm.

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Well, like we like to do unsolved, we like to go all the way back to the beginning. Let's go way, way, way back. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years to our ancient ancestors living on the savannas, living in the forest, hanging out in trees. Right. If you look at like primate societies, baboons and chimps and gorillas and all of that, they're obsessed with status. Right. They're obsessed with where they're at in the hierarchy and the pecking order. There's always these little games going on. Right. The alpha. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Exactly.

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That's not just kind of like these mind games that like came out of nowhere, right? There's actually a real evolutionary reason for that. Mother Nature produced this through natural selection because your social position in these hierarchical societies like this determines your access to like food and to mates and even protection from the group. Like if you're liked by the group or not, if you're where you're at in the hierarchy is determines whether or not you get protection from an outside predator or something like that. Yeah. It makes sense. Yeah.

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There's a strong survival motivation behind all of that, right? Like if you're in a tribe, let's say you're in a tribe of 20 people and you get twice, you're able to gather twice as much food as everybody else. Right. Like obviously they should protect you first. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

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Makes sense. Right. So, yeah, you can see how this would naturally evolve. There's got to be some machinery there to compare, right, of some kind. So that's where, you know, we talked in the friendship episode about Dunbar's number and his social brain hypothesis. And just to recap that real quick, if you didn't listen to that, the social brain hypothesis is that we develop these huge brains so that we can navigate these social situations. Yes.

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And a huge amount of your brain power, as we'll see, is dedicated to being able to compare. This person has more than me. That person doesn't have more than me. This person's higher in rank than me or lower in rank than me. Huge, huge parts of your brain are dedicated just to that. So it's obviously very, very important. It's not just some like random thing that Mother Nature accidentally did to us, right? It means that we are just predisposed to this social comparison.

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Um, it's basically our brains evolved as these like social computers. They're constantly processing social information, environmental information, and figuring out where we stand. Because if you think about it, uh, knowing where you stand in the hierarchy in the, in the pecking order is absolutely also, uh, very important to survival. Like if you, if you don't, if you don't have a good sense, if you overestimate where you're at, if you think you're higher in the pecking order, you're probably going to challenge people.

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like an alpha or an alliance that you shouldn't be doing. On the flip side, if you underestimate, then you are probably missing out on opportunities within the social group to either advance or secure more resources or more mates or whatever it is, right? And so it's actually really, really important that you can accurately assess

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where you stand. And you do that through comparison, right? But that's why your brain is such a relative comparison machine. It looks around you, not just like in absolute terms, oh, I better my situation. But if somebody else around you is doing better, then I mean, in ancient times, that was a survival mechanism. It makes a ton of sense, right? Like if you're not the person who's able to gather twice as much food, you don't want to...

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Imagine that you are because then you're going to start demanding special treatment from people and they're going to get pissed off and it's going to cause a lot of social disharmony. The thing that's super interesting about this and a point that I want to make is this all happens on a very unconscious level. This is extremely innate to our –

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to our psychology, to our, to our, just the way our brain is wired. It's part of human nature, yeah. It is involuntary. Yeah. And it is, it is very much the basis of how we operate within the world. I do want to bring up the point that like the notion of equality,

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The notion of, I guess, say, a status-free existence or the fact that everybody is on an equal playing field and every life is just as valuable as every other life. That is a very modern invention. That is something that arguably has only existed in the last 2,000 years and really only become popular or predominant in the last couple hundred years.

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So this kind of rainbows and unicorns, like, hey, we're all equal. We're all in this together. We all deserve the same thing. I think philosophically that it can be very true, but that's just not the way we're designed or wired. Like, that's just not how we evolved. And so there is a tension there. And I just want to point that out because I think a lot of why people struggle with this is that they're like –

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well, why can't we all just get along and be happy and respect each other? And everybody's different, but everybody's got their own talent. And why can't we just celebrate each other? Again, kind of like a rosy, idealistic picture. I think it's a great intention, but that's not...

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like hundreds of thousands of years of evolution like that was not what was most adaptive to to the environment i it's only really been adaptive to the environment in the last century yeah so i'd take it even one step further so there's um the psychologist paul bloom um if he's talked to i've he's talked about this before but um in

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Tribal societies, even modern ones too, but in the past in particular, tribal societies that do exhibit some form of egalitarianism, they're egalitarian precisely because they are so obsessed with status. If somebody is getting a little too big for their britches or something like that, there's these incredibly powerful mechanisms, group mechanisms that they use to put them back in line.

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That's kind of like the other side of it, too. Like, oh, yeah, you can have an egalitarian society by being obsessed with a status within the group. Which tracks. Yeah. 100% tracks. Which tracks. Yeah. I mean, it's funny because when you read about, you know, like these hippie communes of the 60s and 70s are like the communist experiments and this former Soviet Union or Southeast Asia are like –

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powerful enforcement mechanisms. They are the most status obsessed people. Yeah. The most. Like they are constantly obsessed with status because you have to constantly be thinking about status to cut everybody down to the same size. Yeah. So it is a little paradoxical in that way. It absolutely is. It goes back to that social brain hypothesis, though. There's so much brain power and energy we spend on this kind of thing because it's just in our evolutionary past, it was that important. Yeah. Now.

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That said, you know, the modern versions of this do cause a lot of kind of internal torment like we've already talked about. If you're obsessing over status in groups that you're really not even a part of, which is kind of what we do a lot of these days, that's not super healthy. Or, you know, we channel this into like career aspirations or something where and, you know, we've talked about how we're very bad about predicting what's going to make us happy. But we just we're running on this software that says you need to achieve and compare yourself. And, you know, that's where we run into trouble with it.

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Yeah. The other thing I want to bring up the two in this is, you know, we evolved this kind of whole emotional toolkit around this too. Again, goes to show the social brain hypothesis, just how much we dedicate, just how much brain space and mind space we dedicate to this. There's all these emotions that we have around regulating status or comparison. I kind of grouped them into three different categories. Mm-hmm.

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You have like the status promotion emotions. You have status protection and repair emotions. And then you have status stabilizing and hierarchy ones. I can just kind of rifle through some of these. But, you know, emotions like pride, envy, admiration, moral indignation. Those are kind of status promoting emotions that we have. You think about pride. You know, if you're proud of something, you kind of you're going to signal that to other people. And that's an attempt for you to kind of up your status within a group. Right. Yes.

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Envy, even though it's typically thought of as a kind of a negative emotion, which it is, that is kind of serves a similar purpose where you're at least striving. You're like, that person has this. I want that. How do I get that? Right. And there's the flip side of that. Maybe the more positive is like admiration. You admire somebody. Right. It's funny because I feel like there is a thin line between envy and admiration. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We'll get into that, I think.

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But yeah, so like status protection, you have shame, guilt, you know, we did the shame episode, embarrassment, humility. Those are status protection or repair emotions. You do something that would lower your status within a group. If you show those emotions, it's more likely, oh, people are more likely to be a little more empathetic to you and you preserve some status there. Mm-hmm.

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The stabilizing ones are contempt and gratitude. If you have contempt for others, it marks a norm violation within the group and you're trying to bring them down a peg. Whereas gratitude, again, you're showing admiration for somebody else in that situation as well.

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So that's kind of the foundation. Anyway, the kind of evolutionary reasons for why we are so, so obsessed with comparing. We just can't help but compare ourselves to other people, right? It's interesting. I'm looking at the status promotion emotions and the status protection emotions. Like if you look at the status promotion emotions, pride, envy, pride.

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Indignation, moral outrage. Yeah. If you think about people who are like kind of chronically experience those emotions, like it's a very it's very much kind of like a grandiose narcissist. Like, yes, it's a grandiose narcissist is like proud about everything he does. Extremely envious of anybody who's like performing better. And.

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often experiences indignation and moral outrage. And then the status protection emotions are, I think, kind of vulnerable narcissists. Yeah. Chronically experience them. So they're constantly ashamed. They constantly feel guilty of everything. They feel a constant sense of embarrassment or that they're marginalized. Just made that connection. Yeah. I'm shooting from the hip on that one. No, that's a good one. I really like that. Coming in hot.

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Yeah. Yeah. No, that's really good. I think, I think it's absolutely right. And you take into their extremes. That's what happens. Yes. And so that's a, that's a point to keep in mind as well. You could, you could almost look at those two. They're like, uh, they're kind of like broken status management systems. Yeah. You know, all of that is to say that.

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you can't escape this. Okay. This is part of our nature. We have to learn how to work with it. I want to set up the whole episode with that. Comparison isn't necessarily a flaw. Yes. Okay. It's just, it's innate. We have to deal with it. We have to learn how, you know, there's a good way to handle it and there's a bad way to handle it. And that's what the rest of this whole episode is going to be about. Yes. We're actually going to get into all of the benefits of social comparison in this episode as well, which definitely don't get the airtime. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely.

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Yeah. All right, Drew. So given how universal of an experience social comparison is, how innate it is to our human nature, it is no surprise then that philosophers across the world and all cultures have been wrestling with how to manage social comparison. And this is, I think –

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This is an interesting subject because it's a case where East and West differ pretty broadly. Usually what we see is there's quite a bit of overlap between Western philosophy and Eastern philosophy, or at least slightly different takes on the same conclusion. In this case, there's a wide diversion, I think. And I'm going to start with the East, which is Confucianism and Buddhism.

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Really, from what I can tell, and I'm definitely not as well read on Confucianism as I am on a lot of other philosophies, but from what I can tell, Confucianism really just –

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decided to own it and was like, look, there's a status hierarchy. Some people are better than you and some people are worse than you. And that's OK. You should get along with everybody and you should just do your best to move up and down the hierarchy. You know, Confucianism is very much based on a framework of five types of relationships and four of those relationships involve some sort of hierarchy or status attainment involved.

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whether that's through your parents or your family or some sort of authority figure. Right. The one that didn't was friendship, right? Correct. The ideal friendship, though, which doesn't always work that way, but yeah. And the idea behind this is that ultimately, wherever you are on the hierarchy, you have a role to play. And it is you contribute to the overall social harmony. That it's even if you are –

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scrubbing the floor somewhere, you serve an important purpose and you need to fulfill that purpose and you need to do your work and be diligent and contribute to society and like that is, that just happens to be your role. So it's a little bit more fatalistic, I think, than a lot of Western thought. You know, you often see these videos or you read articles and stuff where I would just call it like kind of,

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anti-Chinese porn. You know, like sometimes you'll see these takes that are just like, wow, can you believe how they do it in China? And it just feels, as an American, it just feels so foreign and different. It's alien, yeah. And also unethical. Right. You know? When you kind of understand the Chinese culture or if you read a little bit about Chinese culture and understand their history and the history of Confucianism and just like the kind of the moral order that...

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Chinese and Eastern people see themselves in like a lot of those arrangements make a lot more sense another way to think about it is that the Confucianism take is like your individual comparison like doesn't really matter that much like yes some people are better than you but who cares you have a role to play and like do your job well and respect your elders and respect the authorities and do your best essentially um

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Buddhism, on the other hand, really, I think of all the philosophies, I think Buddhism really struggles with this the most. It's Buddhism. Obviously, the basis of Buddhism is a non-attachment. And comparison is very much a form of attachment. Like when you compare yourself to another person and you decide like, wow, she has such pretty hair. I wish I had pretty hair. Or, wow, that guy makes a lot of money. I wish I made a lot of money. Right.

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A Buddhist would say that you are attaching your happiness to some external illusion and not reality itself, that everything that you compare yourself to is an illusion ultimately. And so the more you invest yourself into those comparisons and attachments, the more you're just going to invite more dukkha or suffering into your life.

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Now, the Buddha did preach a concept of mudita, which is basically a sympathetic joy, or I guess what we would call like a compassion or a happiness for others. So the idea is that anytime you are socially comparing yourself to somebody else, somebody's doing better than you, somebody has something that you don't, you envy something in others, that is an opportunity to be happy for that person, which sounds nice. Right, yeah.

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But like, honestly, like how, how practical is that? So that those are kind of the two primary Eastern schools of thought in the West. I'm going to give you one guess who kind of nailed this first. You know, just based on literally every episode we've ever done on this whole fucking show. Was it? Who do you think nailed this? Was it Aristotle? Oh, it was Aristotle. Once again. I'm real good. You know, guys.

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Maybe you should just go read the Nicomachean Ethics and skip the podcast because it's kind of feeling that way at this point. Aristotle, as usual, nailed it and he nailed it before anybody else did. So Aristotle, in his work called The Politics, he declared that humans are what are known as a zuon politicon, which is a political animal, which –

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Again, he rightly identified that this is just an inherent part of our nature. The same way a bird flies and a fish swims, we compare ourselves to each other. That's just how humans are. And to live well, we have to navigate the delicate art of comparing ourselves while living within a community. And so for Aristotle, this meant finding a moral or virtuous form of comparison.

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So basically, Aristotle argued that there are two forms of comparison. One he called phthonos, that's P-H-T-H-O-N-O-S, which essentially translates to envy. And then there's xalos, which is emulation. And this, I think loosely we could...

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qualify as toxic and healthy comparison. So the toxic comparison is just pure envy and jealousy and greed. It's like, you have a thing I want, therefore I hate you until I get it. Whereas, Xalos, or the emulation, is, wow, you have done a bunch of things that I wanna do, that's really inspiring, maybe I can learn from you, maybe I can act like you, maybe I can do things that you've done so I can experience the same benefits.

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Now, in the rhetoric, Aristotle wrote, emulation is a good feeling and belongs to good men. Envy is base and belongs to bad men. That's very deep. That's like, I could have been Dr. Seuss. I'm pretty sure.

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Very simple. Who wrote that? But in modern psychology, this is what we would today call in social comparison theory. This is what would be referred to as a maladaptive form of social comparison versus an adaptive form of social comparison. So basically a maladaptive form of social comparison is a form of social comparison that makes you feel worse. That –

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makes you more antisocial and that decreases your mental health or your ability to achieve something, whereas an adaptive form of social comparison is something that inspires you, motivates you. Maybe it's a role model. Maybe it's somebody you look up to. Maybe it's somebody you want to emulate or replicate the great things that they've done.

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And I guess this really gets into the unsung aspect of social comparison theory, which is obviously the dark side is something that we experience all the time. It's why it gets talked about all the time. It's why it gets talked about all the time. It's why a bajillion people email me and ask, like, how do I stop comparing myself to others?

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That is also a form of social comparison. That is also somebody that you have looked at and you have compared yourselves to them and you have said, I want to be like that. What's fascinating is I think that the root of what makes social comparison adaptive versus maladaptive, it is the perception that you are capable of replicating what they've done. So –

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I think a maladaptive form of social comparison is very zero sum, right? It's like, okay, you own the Ferrari. I want to own a Ferrari. There's only so many Ferraris in the world. So if you have one, that means there's a less chance I'm going to have one. So fuck you. I'm going to take your Ferrari. Whereas an adaptive form of comparison is, I think, positive sum. It's like you've done great things. That actually is evidence that I can do great things too, right?

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it doesn't diminish the chance that I'm going to do great things. In fact, the fact that I know you means I'm more likely to do great things. So I'm so excited that I get to know you and hang out with you and learn from you and all that stuff. That's a lot harder to put into like a pithy little quote though, right? Like comparison is a thief of joy. Yeah. Right. That's that one of the Roosevelt supposedly said that. I don't remember which one, but how do you put that? Well, if you're, you know, if you're aiming up,

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Yeah. At somebody who is, you know, you admire and how do you – there's just no way to put that in a nice little big quote. You know what I'm saying? It's funny too because I also think social comparison gets such a bad rap because I think we generally –

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the maladaptive form of comparison, like the comparison that feels bad, I think it tends to be very conscious. Like we're very aware of it, right? When we feel bad about it. Whereas all the positive forms of it, I think we do unconsciously. So if you think of a mentor in your career or something, you're probably not thinking consciously of how you're comparing yourself to them. You're probably just so grateful of like, I'm glad this person's helping me.

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I'm glad I have somebody to look up to, somebody to reach out to. Yeah. And it shows up in your motivation, not in your assessment of the whole situation. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So for Aristotle, ultimately, comparison, social comparison, it's not a moral failure. It's actually a moral opportunity.

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And Aristotle argued that a megalopsychos or a great-souled person is somebody who is mature enough to only compare themselves for the right reasons and in the right ways. To basically find something honorable and admirable about each person that they compare themselves to and then use that as inspiration or motivation to improve themselves. That was essentially Aristotle's take. Which—

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Psychology is kind of backed up, but on the other hand, psychology is also based in Western philosophy, which was basically invented by Aristotle. So there is an argument that there's a lot of circularity going on here. But...

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I guess as Western individuals who have grown up swimming in the water of Western philosophical thought, it certainly makes sense to me. And this is certainly like the perspective I've always had on social comparison, that it's an A, it's inevitable, and B, you can do it well and you can leverage it to improve yourself and not hurt yourself.

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Well, I think there was a little bit in Confucian thought, though, too, of that, right? There was a conscious choosing of who you surround yourself with, right? So there is some of that as well. Yeah. So to be clear, you know, Confucianism, it's big on relationships. It's big on harmony. And it—

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it's, while it's fatalistic about the hierarchy piece, I think that the key difference is that Western thought seems to say, you can climb as far as you want on the higher, like anybody's capable of climbing that hierarchy. Whereas I think Confucian thought is a little bit more like, look,

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Your parents are always going to be your parents and you better fucking respect them and obey them. And there's nothing you're ever going to do that's going to like surmount that or overcome that. And similar with like a lot of authority positions. Like it's just this is the way it works. Yeah. You know, get used to it.

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I think for a long time that Western thought was kind of like that still too, right? You remember back like the great chain of being. Have you ever heard like of that? And like ancient Western thought, there was this great chain of being, which is very similar to the Confucius kind of hierarchy. Yeah. Like there's a place for you in society and it's against God if you don't perform those rules and duties. Your father was a cobbler. That means you're a cobbler and you just keep the great chain going. I think it's more of a modern invention of Western thought that is like the climbing. Yeah.

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But the seeds were planted definitely by Aristotle. And not to get on to too much of a diversion. We talked about this a little bit in the procrastination episode. But the history of Western philosophy is really fascinating because –

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A lot of this stuff originated with the Greeks and Romans, went away with the fall of the Roman Empire. Yeah. Got kind of buried or overridden. And in the case of Aristotle, was lost to Europe and was preserved by Arabic and Middle Eastern cultures and then only reentered European culture in the 13th century. Yeah, yeah.

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And actually Thomas Aquinas saved, basically salvaged Aristotle. Like he was the one who came across Aristotle and was like, this is incredible. We need to find a way to make this kosher with, you know, the clergy and the pope. Okay. And then that was kind of his great work was like taking Aristotelian thought and then translating it in such a way that the church wouldn't banish it. Interesting. Okay. Like they had banished everything else. Yeah. Okay. That makes sense.

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So shout out to Thomas Kynas. That's my boy. That's my boy. You know, saving Aristotle from the clergy. Yeah. My man.

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Um, so then we get to the Stoics. The Stoics are super interesting around this because obviously this, you know, the Stoic case here is just like, don't compare yourself to like, that's kind of the Stoic line. Don't compare yourself to others to compare, compare yourself to your past self or compare yourself to your ideal self. Like that's just the ideal. Yeah. That line of thought very much originates or it was at least popularized by the Stoics. Um, yeah.

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The irony here is that some of the most popular Stoics were like racked with envy and like insecurity around comparisons, which I think there's an interesting tangent here that we could go on. But, you know, if you read Seneca's letters, second richest man in Rome favored by the emperor, you know, part of the aristocracy.

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And he's just like completely insecure about his status at all times. He's worried about is he doing enough? Is he powerful enough? Is he being listened to? It's super fascinating. And then you get a similar thing with Marcus Aurelius in Meditations, where he's like,

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He's incredibly concerned and insecure about his place in history, how he's going to stack up to other emperors and how and how he's going to be remembered and what his legacy is going to be. And if like any of the people in his court or any of his subjects are like actually going to appreciate all the things he did for him. I find it fascinating that arguably the two most powerful philosophers maybe ever are.

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were in some ways the most insecure. Like they seem the most worried about this. Whereas you get somebody like Epictetus, who was literally a slave, who called comparison the disease of the soul. So I don't know. I thought that was interesting.

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Very interesting. And then finally, moving up to modern day, we get The Existentialist, which, as you know, I'm a huge fan of. Sartre actually wrote quite a bit in Being a Nothingness about... He called it the look. Simone de Beauvoir actually popularized it more of being othered, or becoming the other, or the verb version of being the other. And basically, Sartre's point about it is that

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It's our awareness that we're observed that creates, like, forces us to create a conception of ourselves in our own mind. Which I think, I believe this predates, I believe Sartre predates the developmental psychology's, like, discovery of theory of mind and everything. So I think he was correct about this, like, multiple decades before psychologists eventually caught up and found the same thing. But it's basically once you become aware that you're being observed by other people, you –

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as a form of survival necessity, you start developing a, an identity for yourself. You start constructing an identity for yourself, um, to, as a form of self-preservation as a way of like, okay, if other people are seeing me and they have a conception of who I am, quote unquote, then I need to have a conception of who I am, quote unquote. I guess the, the kind of revolutionary insight, uh, of, from Jean-Paul Sartre and the existentialist in general is that like everything, um,

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okay, yes, you have to compare yourself to others. You have to be aware of the otherness, of your otherness to the people who are observing you. But you still get to decide what that means. You get to decide you are naturally going to compare yourself to the people around you. You are naturally going to be envious of people who are more successful of you and maybe a little bit resentful or arrogant towards the people who are less successful of you. That's all going to happen. But what Sartre says is you get to decide if it means anything or not.

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You can choose if that actually defines who you are or if you're going to define yourself by some other means. Yeah. And there's a lot of religious traditions, too, that have something around. A lot of times I'll call it the fall, like in the Bible, the story of Adam and Eve, them becoming self-aware. Right. Right.

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Yes. Where are you going there? Sorry. No, no, no, no. I just got excited because you're 100% right. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And this happens through not just in Christianity, but it's a lot of different religious traditions where they have this idea of what they call the fall. Yes. Right. Which is in some way we've become aware, self-aware. Yes. Only through relation of, through other people. Right. We only know who we are in relation to other people. And for so many religions, that's the point at which.

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we fall we've fallen from from god's grace or from the purity that we once knew before that yeah so yeah i think the blissful ignorance of not knowing the separation between self and right like society when they became self-aware they realized they were naked and then all sin flow flowed out of that right right like right and i think i think the exact words in the bible are are something around that of like of like they became aware that they were being seen and suddenly became ashamed right right which

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psychologically speaking is pretty accurate right right right that's one side of it yeah yeah yeah for sure because it's you know as we've talked about like we talked about in the shame episode it's it's like it's only as the as the conception of uh of separate self emerges in childhood that we start processing and understanding all the ways in which we're inadequate or we don't live up right uh or or that we we must hide ourselves right and uh so yeah it's just super interesting yeah

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I do want to touch on a couple of myths before we move on. These are just common beliefs and assumptions that a lot of people have around social comparison that are not necessarily true. So the first myth is that there's some level of wisdom or enlightenment or success that you stop comparing yourself to others. There is no evidence of that. In fact, I find it very amusing how much like pop spirituality is.

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and pop self-help when you actually look at what they idealize it's basically just being a psychopath yeah they're peddling this idea yeah like it's basically like i never care what anybody think i only do what i want uh i am like completely confident in myself at all times and uh

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I'm a self-contained miracle. Exactly. And it's, and it's like, there are no repercussions or trade-offs to any of my behaviors. It's like, well, you know, yeah, that's, that's actually what a psychopath believes. And, uh, things don't turn out well for them. Generally speaking. Yeah. Yeah.

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It's funny, too, because I mean, it's this is something that you see, you know, if there is a form of enlightenment, I think what it is is probably more of what like Sartre describes and being a nothingness, which is like you're aware of the comparison. You feel the comparison, but you don't necessarily identify with comparison. You don't you don't you choose not to make it meaningful. I know like the Dalai Lama has said stuff around this before. Like, it's funny because.

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Sometimes you'll see the Dalai Lama get interviewed by like a journalist and they're like, are you ever sad? And he just like laughs at them. He's like, yeah, of course I'm sad. Like all the time. Right. Right. You know, but he's like sadness is still beautiful in its own way. And I'm still like, just because you feel something doesn't mean it's true. It doesn't mean it's meaningful. It doesn't mean it's permanent. Like I think, you know, what the Dalai Lama exemplifies is that, yeah.

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He's very human, but those he, the thing that's unique about him is, is his constant awareness of how transitory his humanness is. Right. That's the, that's the real wisdom. Right. Like he feels sad, but he understands like, oh, this isn't going to last. So don't, don't buy into it too much. It is funny though. Like, I mean, as you know, I, I was very much into Buddhism in my twenties and I did a lot of retreats and meditated pretty seriously for a while, read a lot of books and, uh,

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One of the things that I think kind of turned me off from it is I noticed that the more I got into it, the more the Buddhist practice itself turned into another status game. So what I noticed is that I started becoming attached to how well I could detach from other areas of my life. Yeah.

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how much was I meditating? How equanimous was I feeling on a regular basis? And I noticed it in some of the other students that were like really getting into it as well. They're like, you know, they started kind of measuring their own self-worth in terms of like how many retreats were they doing and how much they were working with the teacher and all this stuff. And I was like, isn't this exactly what we're trying to get away from? Like, aren't we just kind of signing up for the same race, but just,

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Look how little ego I have. Exactly. I have less ego than you. No, I have less ego. There were just very subtle wisps of envy and comparison showing up even, you know, in a Zen retreat or in a monster. That's just how pervasive it is.

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I mean, even when you when you spend your whole life trying to detach from it, you still find little little nooks and crannies to attach to. It never completely goes away. It really never does. So second myth is that comparison always harms us. I think we already covered this. But one thing that you do see across all of these philosophies and schools of thought is that.

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Comparison is always an opportunity for something good, right? Like in Buddhism, it's an opportunity for greater compassion and joy for others. In Confucianism, it's an opportunity to improve relationships and social harmony. You know, with Aristotle, it's an opportunity to improve yourself and

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inspire yourself. It's not necessarily a bad thing and I think it is probably useful to sit and think about all the ways that social comparison has actually been useful for you in your life. And then the final myth that I think you see pop up quite a bit is that

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The only way to be free of comparison is to isolate yourself. And this is a little bit hardcore, but you see this quite a bit of people who, you know, go off grid. They go out to the countryside. They get rid of all their devices. They delete all their online accounts. I'm not going to participate in society. Right. And it's because I don't want to compare myself to everybody else. Yeah. Like that comparison disease that I have. Yeah. And it's it's a cancer out type of thing. Yeah.

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Yeah, I think it would be interesting sometime to meet or talk to a person like that and like see if they struggle, how much they still struggle with it. You know, it's interesting. We did a YouTube video with a guy. So there's a guy, this guy named Brent Underwood, who he's used to work with Ryan Holiday or still works with Ryan Holiday a little bit. And he bought a ghost town out in the middle of the valley in California. Yeah. And so we drove out there. He's been living out there for like.

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two or three years now, I think, mostly by himself. A few people come in and out of the town, but he's basically in this abandoned ghost town. It used to be a silver mine. He owns the whole thing. It's pretty run down, but he's been up there by himself probably for the majority of the last three years. And we went up there and shot a YouTube video with him. And it was, I actually love that video. Like it was very, it came out very philosophical and very kind of meditative.

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He's a very interesting, well-spoken guy. But it's funny because like one of the first things he told me when I interviewed him, he said he's like anybody watching this who thinks that like running off to the middle of nowhere is going to solve your problems.

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He's like, let me just tell you, it doesn't. It doesn't. It doesn't at all. Probably makes them worse. Yeah, he said some of them, it makes them worse. He's like, you know, it helps some of them, but it makes others of them worse. And I think in this case, you know, cutting yourself off from things –

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you're not necessarily solving a problem, you're probably just replacing one problem with another, which is the trade off here is the more isolated you become, the more lonely you're gonna feel. And so you pick your poison. Do you wanna feel lonely and isolated or do you wanna struggle with insecurity of having to be around others? And isn't life grand?

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I saw something slightly tangential, but I saw something recently where a guy, he tried to go out and make his own chicken sandwich from absolute scratch. Oh, I've seen this. Have you seen this one? It's amazing. Took him six months and $1,500. Yes, it's amazing. For a chicken sandwich. Right? The point, though, is that we're, as humans, we are very socially interdependent. And that's like part of our nature as well. That's where this comparison comes from. And so it's not about getting rid of it. It's learning how to manage it more. That's the point we keep hammering on, I know, but.

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Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And look, I mean, we're going to talk about digital stuff later. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, like there is something to be said if you feel overwhelmed by comparison or if you are say surrounded by assholes, which, you know, one of the, I think the defining characteristics of an asshole is that, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um,

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They encourage or promote unhealthy forms of comparison. Yeah. They force them on you. Yeah. Yeah. Like it's if you find yourself in those situations, then sure, cutting yourself off temporarily or in some areas of life can make sense. Yeah. But ultimately, like, I mean, as you and I keep coming back to episode after episode,

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There is probably nothing in the psychological literature of over 100 years of research and study and clinical practice more consistently replicated and proven over and over again that happiness is relationships, essentially. That is kind of the short version. If you were to distill all of psychological knowledge down into a phrase, it would probably be happiness.

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Happiness is good relationship. Yeah. Again, you can't know who you are except in relation to other people, and that necessitates comparison. Well, we're just about to get into that. Let's get into it. Let's get into it.

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So talking about the psychology of comparison, social comparison, you know, the exact same achievement can feel like a triumph or a total failure, and it all comes down to who you're standing next to. So there's an interesting thing known as the silver medal paradox, which is that basically when you go survey Olympic athletes who just won a medal,

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What you consistently find is that the happiest person is the guy who won the gold medal. The second happiest person is the person who won the bronze medal. And the least happy person is the person who won the silver.

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Which is kind of sick and twisted, but it makes sense, right? Obviously, the gold medal winner is thrilled. The bronze medal winner is thrilled because they got a medal, right? They were this close to just not even being on the podium. Whereas the silver medalist is like, man, if I just pushed a little harder, if I didn't fuck up that one turn, if my form was a little bit better, I could have gotten the gold. Right.

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And I think this is illustrative of the problem and also of why and how psychology has just been trying to attack for over a century. Like, how do we compare ourselves better? How do we make more? If we're doomed to compare ourselves to others and if we're doomed to constantly be, you know, dissatisfied with what we have or what we've accomplished, we're not.

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You know, how can we do this better? So it starts in the 1890s with a researcher named Norman Triplett. And he noticed something that is probably pretty obvious to us today, which is that he noticed that when people cycled together, they tended to ride faster overall as a group. And sure enough, you see this replicated all over the place. When you do things together with other people, you tend to do them better. You do them longer. You do them faster. You do them further. You do them more consistently. Yeah.

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And that's simply because we're competitive. Like we like being, we like impressing other people. Again, another advantage of social comparison that is largely unconscious and we largely don't think about. I've noticed this this year myself where, you know, for a number of years, when I got into running, I always ran by myself. And I really just ran to like improve my own times. I wasn't really training for anything. I wasn't really doing anything with it.

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And then this year I started signing up for various races and endurance events and stuff with friends and people. And it's crazy how much more motivation it gives you. So I'm doing this thing called the High Rocks about a month from now. And it's a crazy endurance thing. I like Google it. It's wild. It's a lot.

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I don't even know why I'm doing it. Actually, I do know why because two friends of mine signed up for it and they like challenged me to do it with them. And it's funny because it's a thing that if I had been on my own, I would have rolled my eyes. Actually, I know I rolled my eyes because I remember the first time I heard about it, I remember looking at it and being like, why on earth would anybody put themselves through this? Like this is the stupidest thing. And then jump ahead six months. Here you are. Yeah.

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A couple of buddies invite me and I'm like, oh, dude, I'm in. And like, of course, what's the first thing I think about? I'm like, I'm going to totally crush them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to train. I'm going to get a plan. I'm going to like fix my nutrition and I'm going to fucking crush these guys.

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And it's fun. Yeah. It's fun. It's exciting. My workouts get more interesting. I'm more motivated each day. Like the days I don't want to go work out, I force myself to go work out. Why? Because I'm thinking about like, yeah, I don't want to show up for the high rocks and be the weakest link. So, again, there is an unconscious advantage to this, an advantage that largely goes unnoticed.

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Another one I found of this too was really interesting is Olympic sprinters. When the female Olympic sprinters trained with the men, they actually had better times. Wow. Which was pretty wild. That's crazy. Isn't that wild? That's so interesting. I mean, again, like a comparative, I mean, they're highly competitive people. Yes, of course. And so they're going to try harder in those situations where there's somebody who's better than them, faster than whatever it is. But yeah, they found that pretty consistently as well. That's so interesting. So then the question of...

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How do you make sure you leverage this in a positive way and not a negative way? Because we've all had the experience where competitiveness has kind of turned against us or become unproductive and unnecessarily adversarial. Definitely, yeah. And William James, often considered the father of psychology, put together an equation.

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that tried to analyze this. And I think it's a nice equation. He basically said that self-esteem equals success divided by pretensions. Another way of thinking about that is that your self-esteem is equivalent to what you've achieved or accomplished divided by your expectation of what you can achieve and accomplish. So generally speaking, people who have a very low self-esteem –

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They either have unreasonable expectations of what they should be doing, which you see this a lot. People, a lot of depressed people or miserable people, they think they should be able to do everything and accomplish everything and be the best at everything. And they just drive themselves crazy. Yeah.

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And then also you need to have actually like gotten out and done something that you feel good about. You feel a little bit coming back to the status protective emotions, something that you feel proud of, that you're proud to wear on your identity as a badge or build your identity around as a badge.

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Now, for William James, he rightly observed that our identity is largely based on how other people see us. Like, we're very influenced by other people's perceptions of ourselves. And this can be both a good thing and a bad thing, right? Like, if a lot of people admire you, then it will cause you to feel good about yourself. And that can be a very healthy thing. Like, it can create a virtuous cycle, right? Like, it's like, okay, people respect me. They expect a lot out of me.

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Therefore, I should expect a lot out of myself. Therefore, I become more likely to do great things. But it can also work against you, right? If you feel like people don't like you or they have low expectations of you or they don't

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don't expect much of you. It can cause you to have low expectations for yourself. And then of course you're less likely to go do great things or, or improve yourself. So James basically saw this, I guess you could call it a golden mean, right? You, you don't want, you don't want people who inflate your ego too much and, and, and,

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Cause you to be delusional, right? Tell you that your shit doesn't stink and you're amazing at everything you do. But at the same time, you know, you don't want the expectation to outweigh the achievement. But at the same time, you don't want people to diminish you or disrespect you or make you feel like you have no achievements at all. So there's somewhere in there, there's a happy medium. So it wasn't until Leon Fessinger in the 1950s with social comparison theory, he really took what William James was.

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discovered and posited and tried to add structure around it and tried to really define like, okay, what is good comparison? What is bad comparison? What is too much of each one? And this is where we get the upward comparison and the downward comparison, as you mentioned before, you know, so the upward comparison is when you compare yourself to somebody that you perceive as being superior or better to you in some way. And there's a healthy and unhealthy form of upward comparison. So a healthy form of upward comparison would be

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inspiring, motivating. You would be able to learn from them. Maybe they're a role model. Maybe they're a mentor. Maybe they're somebody you look up to. An unhealthy form of upward comparison would be somebody who just is, you perceive as being so good and so great and so perfect that it causes you to feel worse about yourself.

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What's interesting here is that this gets a little bit back into what we talked about on the resilience episode in terms of self-efficacy. Yeah. Yeah. So like when it comes to upward comparison, it really seems like the key ingredient is the perception that this person you're comparing yourself to that what they have is attainable for yourself. Right.

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So if you look at somebody and you've decided that they are so perfect and so great and there's nothing you can ever do to be like them, then you're going to feel worse about yourself. But if you look at that person and you think, wow, they did it. I think I can do it too. Then it's actually going to motivate you and inspire you. And that's super interesting. It's funny, too, because I also think it's interesting. So there's there's something like it doesn't explicitly get talked about. Right. Like, but it's.

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A lot of times famous figures or public figures, and they get talked about as role models,

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They often get talked about as role models because of their gender, their ethnicity, their race, their sexual orientation or whatever. What I like about this is that it kind of explains the big deal around certain role models or certain people that we celebrate in society, right? Like if you think about somebody like Barack Obama or Oprah Winfrey or people who have broken barriers –

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Often these people like they're celebrated because of, you know, their gender, their race, their ethnicity, their sexual orientation, things that it's funny that we as a society, we all agree that like shouldn't matter. But then it's like when one of these people shows up and becomes like uber successful, we decide it matters. It matters. Yeah.

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And I think it's because of this, because it's like, okay, when they see that Barack Obama can do it, then anybody who grows up like him, looks like him, is black, like, they can look at him and be like, okay, well, that guy did it.

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that gives me more confidence that I'm capable of doing something. Right, yeah. And it's just funny that that's not really explicitly stated when we celebrate these people, but the reason it is a big deal is that it is when one of those people breaks through and becomes the first of XYZ to become president or be a CEO or be a billionaire, essentially it is increasing the self-efficacy

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across that entire population in society. Yeah, and that was one of Festinger's, one of the points he made in social comparison theory was that we typically, if there was no other objective information out there, we compare ourselves to similar others. Yes. He was kind of the first one to really outline that and define how we did that. So, yeah, that's absolutely, that jives with what he found too way back in the 50s.

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Now let's talk about downward comparison. This is something that we also all do. So it's funny because anytime people complain about comparing themselves to others, they always complain about the upward comparison. They're like, there's this person that makes me feel bad. How do I stop comparing myself? Nobody says, oh, there are these people that I feel much better than. There are these people that I love talking shit about. Yeah.

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You put it that way. There are these people that I think are fucking idiots, and I kind of enjoy the fact that they're fucking idiots. Nobody complains about that. But meanwhile, everybody enjoys that. So downward comparison. Again, it's inevitable. Again, I think there's a healthy and an unhealthy way to do it. In the case of downward comparison,

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I think the healthy way of doing it is seeing how far you've come, being grateful for what you have, understanding what not to do. I think we've all been there. We've seen somebody in our life like fuck up eight ways from Tuesday and be like, okay, not doing that.

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So in those ways, like downward comparison can be very useful. But I would say downward comparison becomes unhealthy in really in two cases is is one is if it generates a sense of complacency of just like I'm the best. I don't need to do shit like these people suck.

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At least I'm not as bad off as them. Yeah. You can start resting on your laurels and get cocky, arrogant, things like that. And then the other thing I'd say is just being malicious. Like there is a certain, I hate to say it, but it's like there's an instinctual pleasure that comes with like,

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seeing other people fuck up at things that like you would never fuck up. Like seeing people make a mistake that you would never make. Right, right, schadenfreude, right? Yeah. And you're just like, what an idiot. Right. And yeah, that can feel good in small doses and it can feel good for like a short period of time, but you wanna be careful not to indulge that too much because it, yeah, it just turns you into a dick. Yeah.

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I have a tendency to go down that rabbit hole sometimes. So yeah, just say, yeah. Oh yeah, we all do. We all do. It's funny, my wife and I, we, for many years, we don't do it anymore. We finally grew up enough.

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We finally matured enough to the point where we stopped doing this. But my wife and I, for many years, we always had one hate follow. And it was purely like, it was, we each, there was somebody that we would follow on social media and it was always somebody in our life, somebody we knew. Oh, okay. And it was somebody that we knew who like we thought was so cringe and embarrassing, but like they didn't realize it. And like we kind of enjoyed.

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how cringe and embarrassing they were. Because at least I'm not this bad. Exactly. Exactly. It's just this like very like kind of mean girls form of satisfaction that comes with it. Yeah. Yeah. I'm happy to report that like we both kind of got grossed out by ourselves and stopped doing that many years ago. That's such a thing though. Everybody, that's so cringe. I hear that all the time now. And, but it's like, there's part of you that enjoys it. Oh, there absolutely is. Part of you enjoys it. Yeah. I see how it's reinforcing for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

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No, I definitely, it's funny. I have not hate followed anybody in many years, but. My, how you've grown. I've become quite virtuous. If you haven't noticed, I am one of Aristotle's megalopsychos. Yeah. And yeah. No ego. You may bask. Look how egoless you are. Yes. There's a, there's a halo appearing on the screen right now as people watch this. I see it. Yeah. Yeah.

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It's worth noting that Fessinger's model was descriptive, not PScriptive. Basically, he's describing how we compare ourselves to others. He's not saying how we should compare ourselves to others. Because, I mean, let's be honest. We make all four of these comparisons. All of us do. Both healthy and unhealthy, upward and downward comparisons.

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So basically William James kind of explained the foundation of how social comparison works. Fessinger explained the mechanics of how it works. And it really isn't into like the late 20th, early 21st century that we start getting prescriptive of like, okay, how do we actually do this better? Or what are ways that we can kind of steer ourselves towards better comparisons? And you want to guess what the primary finding is?

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What it comes back to? Interpretation? What are we going to do? Yeah. Values. Oh, yes, of course. It comes back to values, as it almost always does. Values all the way down. Values all the way down. Values and boundaries, it turns out. So Abraham Tessers, in the late 80s, came up with the self-evaluation maintenance model. Oh, yeah. Which basically...

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What he discovered, and this makes a lot of sense, is that we tend to evaluate people based on things that we care about, right? So let's say you go and win a golf tournament. I don't give two shits about golf. So I'm going to be happy for you. Super proud of me. It doesn't threaten my ego. It doesn't challenge my identity. It doesn't...

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There's no scarcity involved. Whereas let's say I care very, like let's say I've been practicing my ass off on my golf swing and I'll like care really deeply about it. And then you just kind of casually go win a golf tournament. That's likely to spark a lot of envy because golf is something that I have chosen to measure myself by.

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and to build my identity on, and then you go and do the thing that I care about, and you do it better than I do, with seemingly less effort, so yeah, fuck you. And you see this kind of play out in all sorts of different dimensions. One of the ways that, I wrote an article many, many years ago, I think it was even before you started working with me, it was called, We Judge Others How We Judge Ourselves. And it's basically whatever the yardstick that you have internalized for yourself,

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the ruler that you use to measure your own success or a virtue as a human being, that is what you will instinctively apply to others. And then when people drastically outpace you on that yardstick, you will feel threatened. You'll feel envious. You will feel butthurt and you will be kind of a dick about it. Yeah. And everything's a yardstick, right? Yeah. It could be money. It could be how much ego you don't have. It could be anything. Anything. And it looks whatever.

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Anything. Yeah. And again, like coming back to this, it makes sense that this is like largely rooted in values because if you go back to the values episode, one of the things that we hammer on over and over and over is that you have to value something. It is impossible to value nothing. Right. Not valuing anything is a value. Is a form of value.

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Which I guess is what the Buddhist monks find, right? It's like they're attempting the value nothing, which then becomes the new value that they measure themselves and the other monks by. And it becomes competitive and they're like, oh, fuck that guy. He's meditating longer than I am. And it values all the way down. That's what it is. Yeah.

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So the point here is that there are probably better and worse values. There are better and worse yardsticks to measure ourselves by, right? And this kind of gets into, you know, without going too deep into the values episode, but like, you know, there are external and internal values.

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status indicators for ourselves right like i can choose to measure myself by my success in golf tournaments which is probably a bad way to measure myself um it's not something i have total control over it's uh an external and arbitrary metric um it's very competitive um

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Whereas I can choose to measure myself by something much more internal, something I can fully control, like, say, my honesty or my integrity or how I treat people or how good of a friend I am. That's probably a much better way to measure myself and treat myself. And as a result, I'm going to draw better comparisons between myself and others. Right. Kind of the simplest way that I've distilled this before is is I've often written that, you know, the trick isn't to stop comparing yourself to others. It's to compare yourself to.

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better people for better reasons. And ultimately, a certain amount of this is just emotional awareness, it's self-awareness, it's understanding what are you choosing to make important to yourself, because whatever you choose to make important to yourself, understand that that is going to become the basis of comparison that you make towards others. And

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Again, in the values episode, we went on at length about how important and crucial it is to choose your values and know your values and live out your values and practice your values. This is just another form of that. If I like, OK, when you sit down and decide what matters in your life more than anything else, what do you care about? Understand that a side effect of that or a downstream effect of that is that this is going to become the way that you compare yourself to others.

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This is going to become the yardstick that you measure yourself by, that you measure other people by, and it's going to largely dictate and define the sorts of people that you want to surround yourself with and the sort of people that you're going to look up to. Yeah. Choose wisely. Choose wisely. Yeah. That kind of wraps up the psychological section. I do know that there is some interesting neuroscience that goes along with this, but you are the neuroscientist at this table, so I will shut the fuck up and hand it over to you.

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Yeah, a lot of the neuroscience anyway, it kind of – it wraps this all up in a kind of interesting way, I think. I put some finer points on a few of the details that you've mentioned already. Back in the 2000s, there was kind of this foundational study. I mentioned that example about if I make $70,000, I'm happy, or if you only make $50,000. But if you make $90,000, there's a social comparison there, and I'm not as happy. Yeah.

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That bears out in the lab, actually. Okay. So they did this study where they put people in an fMRI. They had them do some task. It doesn't matter what it is because it would give them money if they performed it well, right? And not only did they show them how much money they gained from it, they showed them how much money other people got. Another person who was doing the same thing, how much they got.

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You got the same amount. You were both happy. It was all great. But sometimes they would say, okay, this person gets $40 and you only get $20. Then there was a particular spot in the brain that the ventral striatum doesn't matter. It's involved in reward. It fires more when you get a higher reward or the same reward as somebody else and then less if you don't.

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There's a brain mechanism right there. It's just your brain feels rewards in a relative manner. It's a comparison machine. It's not absolute. And the happiness research on income shows this as well. Same thing. Exact same thing. It's better to be the richest person in a poor neighborhood than the poorest person in a rich neighborhood. It goes back to what I was talking about. Like my grandma, she's like, we were poor, but we didn't know we were poor. Right?

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Because everybody around us was bored. That was kind of the entryway into this social comparison and social neuroscience. There's – you have distinct neural machinery for comparison, why it feels good and why it feels bad too. Downward comparisons, like I did better than this other person, that it's naturally rewarding just on a –

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just on a normal basis it is where upward comparisons are usually like, you know, there's a pinch of like pain with that, but not necessarily. There's some nuance to that that I'll get into in a second. The, when we outperform others, reward circuits tend to light up. And when we are outperformed, like social pain tends to light up. So there's completely different systems for these two. It's not just one system. So one system gets activated over the other. Okay.

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Basically, they kind of gleaned from all of this, and this is getting to the late 2000s, 2010s. They gleaned from all this is that another person's success or failure, it's meaningful to you, but that could be motivating or it can be demotivating. Yeah. All right?

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This brings me to there's kind of like a fork in the road. And this is what we've kind of already talked about this, but there's like a neural basis for it. Right. I'm going to use the emotions of envy and admiration here, but they could be similar emotions or what Aristotle called envy and emulation as well. Right. Right.

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So in envy, your brain kind of has – it assesses the reward versus the pain, but there's also like a threat component to it as well. So when you envy somebody, it feels threatening to you, right? Like that person is doing better than me. I feel threatened. I need to do something about it, right? Yeah. But there's usually – there's a negative connotation to that, right? This occurs in areas like the anterior insula, the anterior cingulate cortex. Yeah.

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Basically, these are the ones that process the social pain. Okay. Okay. Whereas if you have something more like admiration or what Aristotle called emulation, another part of your brain does that as well. So there's like this fork in the road where somehow your brain, you know, this something comes up and then your brain either assesses it as a threat or as, okay, we're going to go into growth mode now, basically. Right? Right.

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Which is pretty interesting. Like there's actual neural machinery that does this. It's fascinating. Yeah. It's really, really interesting. So essentially that when your brain is kind of in this admiration mode, it's actually – it goes searching for possibilities rather than the inadequacies. So –

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Like I think our task is to find that fork in the road, right? Is to find that fork in the road where we can decide, where we can reinterpret that, whether it's CBT or any other methods that we're going to talk about later, is to find that fork in the road and try to push it towards that more admiration and inspiration and upward spiral that we can find. Okay? Yeah.

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Now, the neurosciences too have found there's kind of four different things that can influence this. And we've already mentioned a couple of them actually.

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whether we take that envy path or whether we take the admiration path. One of them you mentioned already was attainability. So like in self-efficacy, can't do I actually see myself as being able to do this? Yeah. Okay. If, if another person's success, if it feels like it's within reach, then it's usually inspiring. And so this is where all this stuff comes in about like, be careful who you, who you admire, who's the target of your admiration. Right. Right.

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Another one is self-security or self-esteem, too. So people with stronger self-esteem, they show less of that kind of envy path, which makes a lot of sense. It's funny because I just see that, especially if you take William James' definition, I just see that as another form of self-efficacy because it's like a person with self-esteem has built up.

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a resume of doing things in their life. And so that's just given them more self-efficacy and belief of like, Oh yeah, I could do that. Yeah. Yeah. No, for sure. And related to that too, is the closeness of the target. Yeah. This goes back to Fessinger again. So he's, he, you know, he said, if, if there's no objective information, we looked at people who are similar to us. So it's usually your peers. If you're comparing yourself to your peers and people who are immediately around you, that's usually a better, you have a better chance of going down that admiration path. Right. And you do the envy path. Okay. Okay.

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And then last is a comparison when it's framed. It's the framing of it. Yes. Basically. So if you see this comparison as a chance to learn or a chance to grow rather than it's just that mind switch really is. Do I see this comparison? Do I see this person achieving this thing that I either envy or admire? Is this a chance for me to grow or is it a chance for me to show how lucky they are or shit on them in some way?

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So those are kind of the four things that neuroscientists and psychologists together have kind of come together and found that we can kind of nudge ourselves towards the admiration route. Yeah. More recently, and you've mentioned this already as well, too. You've hinted at it anyway. Yeah.

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there's this thing what they call temporal comparison. So, and you've talked about this a lot actually before, like especially you find yourself very competitive, you're a competitive person, but the person you like to compete with the most is yourself. Of course. Right? And we actually do this all the time. I think people, we think of social comparison, we think of comparison in general, we're comparing ourselves to others. We actually do this all the time. All of us do this all the time. We're comparing ourselves.

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A lot of us, though, what happens is we're kind of we're beating up our past self and saying, look what you did to me, basically. Maybe not in those exact words, but we're all doing this all the time. But if we can shift that to a I'm better than I was yesterday or last year or whatever it is, that, again, is another method that psychologists and neuroscientists have found that that's actually a lot healthier, more adaptive and leads to more motivation towards your goals and your values.

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I think – so this is the cliche that originated with the Stoics of like don't compare yourself to others. Compare yourself to who you were yesterday or last year or whatever. It's funny because I feel like this is becoming culturally normalized and encouraged. Yes. It's –

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And I think I have a little theory around this. I think a lot of it has to do with like data and video games. So, I mean, we're going to get into how. Yeah. The gamification. The digital world has affected our psychology and our social comparison. But I think this would actually be the.

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positive side of the digitization of culture and society is that like you actually have a record of how you were a year ago you can go back and look what you were doing a year ago right you could see how stupid you were or the dumb thing you posted two years ago or uh you know what what you bench pressed and squatted last last summer you know and you can see how much how far you've come i remember i'm

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it was interesting because, you know, I went through all of school writing papers, not knowing that I was a good writer. And I think a lot of that had to do with just how arbitrary the grading was with each teacher. You know, some teachers gave me great grades and some teachers gave me horrible grades. And,

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I never really understood why I kinda just took it at face value. And when I started writing online, two things happened. One was I could actually go look back at things I wrote a year ago, two years ago, three years ago, and after I wrote for a few years, what I consistently found was like, the further back I went, the more I cringed. The more I was like, holy shit, woof.

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what was this guy thinking? And while that, that in that moment, it felt really bad. It, it, it just like, it's such a gratifying feeling to see like, wow, look how far I've come just in three years of writing blog posts. Right. And then the other thing is that you actually get the data on it. Right. Like you see, you're like, oh, okay. You know, in 2010, I'm like, okay, a normal blog post for me gets 30 comments. Well, wow. I go back and I look at 2008 and it's like,

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three comments. Wow, that's come along. Clearly a lot more people like my writing than they used to. And I think you see this with video games as well. As an avid gamer, most video games will track your skill and performance over time. They'll give you ratings, they'll give you badges, medals. So you can actually see your progression through games and how much better you are at certain games over time.

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So, and then that doesn't even get into, like, you know, apps like Duolingo and Strava. Like, you know, all the gamification that's being built into, you know, education and different, like, health and fitness apps and things like that. You know, even something as simple like…

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I don't know about you, but like the first 10 years that I worked out, I just went to the gym and just like lift. Yeah, I just went. I just like, oh, like, ah, 30 pounds sounds OK. And like I just pick it up and start doing a lift. It really wasn't until I was probably 30 that I actually started writing down my workouts and then like trying to improve on each lift and tracking my progress across things. And yeah.

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So yeah, it is, I think it's a fantastic thing. I think it makes everybody more effective when you're able to track progress like this. And I do think it has been enabled with kind of the information revolution. So before, I know we're about to get into kind of the...

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the disaster of social comparison in the digital age. But before we get there, I just want to- There's a silver lining there too. Yeah, yeah. I want to stand on my soapbox and say like, wait, there's something really good that's happened. Yeah, yeah. No, absolutely. I mean, it's going to be personality based, I think, too. I think some people are just more externally focused than internally focused. And so-

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I think it depends a little bit on your personality. If you are one of those people who does get motivation from external sources, I don't think it's such a bad thing. I know that's probably a lot of people don't agree with that. But again, if you leverage it correctly, if you leverage it right and do it in a healthy way and take that admiration path that we were talking about, then that's great. Yeah.

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You can use both. You can do both. You're going to do it anyway. You're going to measure yourself against your past self no matter what. And you're going to measure yourself against other people no matter what. So it's a matter of, yeah, finding the right balance there in the right situation. Yeah. Would you say it's accurate to kind of summarize –

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This entire section with the way to compare best is to compare in a way to learn and improve. And to compare poorly is when you compare to judge and condemn. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Like, I think there's... You're passing a verdict. Yeah. It's funny because it's... Like, this didn't occur to me when, you know, during the research phase of this episode. But, like, now that we're sitting here talking about it for a couple hours...

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The thing that keeps coming to mind is the growth and fix mindset. When I look at unhealthy comparison, it just feels very fixed. It's like, oh, man, I'm such a loser. She's amazing. I'm never going to be like that. There's nothing I can do. That feels like a very unhealthy comparison. Or she's such a loser. I'm amazing. There's nothing she's ever going to do to change that. Whereas the healthy form of comparison seems to be like,

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oh, wow, that's really impressive. Like, I wonder what I could learn from her. Right there. There's curiosity. Yeah. There's curiosity that comes with it. Yeah, I like that. Like, instead of just, like, knee-jerk jumping to a conclusion about why someone was able to achieve something the way they did or whatever it is, there's a curiosity around it. Yeah. Oh, how do they do that? Interesting. Oh, how do they think about that? How do they go about it? I don't know. You know? Yeah. You can take it too far and be like, what do they eat for breakfast? I'd be like, oh, yeah.

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You know, what's their morning routine? What's their morning routine? Which you and I are both not big fans of like, what's your morning routine? But there's a curiosity there. Get curious, you know, about what's going on with this in the situation. I like that. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, without further ado, let's get into the digital Armageddon. The digital landscape.

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online world. When you connect the world, it seems to be okay. You think it's going well? You think this is going well? Drew Burney, the I'm fine dog in the burning house. Well, you know what? I'm not really on social media, so for me, it's going all right.

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But I hear there are some things about the digital world these days. You hear that, huh? One of those. And we tend to think that actually, yeah, social comparison is probably one of those things. Although I think it might be changing a little bit. I want to get your opinion on that here in a little bit. But –

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Yeah. So let's talk about what social comparison at scale does to us, particularly on the online scale, right? So, you know, we've kind of already covered, obviously, our evolutionary past is that we grew up in these – or we developed in these small-scale societies. And we talk about the social brain hypothesis from Dunbar, right? Yep. We talked about this more in the friendship episode. But just to recap real quick, he had this idea of the concentric circles, right? Mm-hmm.

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You could have up to about five really close intimate friends, about 15 or so good friends, 50 people you're like, oh, yeah, I associate with these people. And then you know about 150 people that you'd have a relationship with. Anything beyond that gets a little hairy, right? Well, obviously, digital technologies kind of scramble that up big time, right?

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But those boundaries that we used to have around those concentric circles are really, really blurred now. And I think we've had a really rough time in the last 20 years trying to navigate that, right? So comparison in this world, it's no longer just like – it's no longer occasional. It's no longer just limited to the people around you, right? It's now scaled up. It's constant. It's global. And it's highly curated too, which is another thing to think about, right? Yes.

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So what I want to do is I want to get into some of kind of the mechanisms. I want to add an adjective to that. Okay. It's permanent, which we will come back to this. We will come back to this. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good one. That's a really good one. We will. Yes. We will touch on it. Okay.

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Yeah, so what I want to do then is get into some of the mechanisms and some of the kind of just the consequences. Just kind of describe the problem of what's actually going on and maybe talk about some of the nuances in there. And maybe talk about where we're headed a little bit with it too. And then we'll get into some of the more prescriptive stuff, how you can maybe like live as a modern person still and not be a total Luddite like me, okay?

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Yeah. Okay. Old man, Bernie, doling out the wisdom coming down from the mountaintop. I'm not a little, by the way, I'm very pro-technology. I just, I think we need to use it in the right way. And that's what we're going to get into here. Right. Basically though, you know, psychologists have, for a while now, they've called it, we live in what they call a leaderboard society. Right. And what they mean by that is.

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But like social, especially social media platforms really mimic this like scorecard, this scoreboard. Yeah. It's very public. It's very out there. It's right in front of your face. And it's constant because we're constantly logged on now, right? Things like likes, followers, shares, endorsements, all of these things.

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It's very clear, like, where you stand in this pecking order that's online. This causes all sorts of problems, obviously. For one, it causes what they call amplification effects, okay? The frequency and volume with which you are comparing yourself to others if you're online is just your brain can't handle it, right? Mm-hmm.

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Again, you're used to being around people. For 99.999% of our history, we've been around small groups, a small group of people that we know intimately. And we occasionally compare ourselves to them. Or we might compare ourselves to them quite a bit, but it's not on the scale that we see now, right? Right.

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um you now compare yourself not just with like 5 10 15 20 people it's literally thousands of people right um then you have like all these little algorithmic nudges that we all know about you know what's the algorithm doing what's the algorithm feeding you what's the algorithm pushing you towards or nudging you towards so you have uh which is typically content that is

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Um, forcing you to compare yourself. It's forcing you to be morally indignant. Like we talked about it's forcing outrage. Uh, and, and yeah, it's, it's, it's forcing that comparison on you when you didn't really even necessarily ask for it, but it's just one big comparison machine. Mm.

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I mean, how else do social media platforms get you to buy things? Anything that's ad-based, right? Right. It's going to sit there. It's going to provide you with some sort of social comparison and then offer you a solution. Yeah. I mean, marketing in a nutshell is like weaponizing feelings of inadequacy. Right. And social media over the last 10 to 15 years has really perfected that.

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Yeah, I mean, it's the biggest adage in human history. Yeah, yeah. So when I was on Instagram too, there was a period about 20, I'm going to say 2018, 2019, where just shit was showing up at my house because I was buying the, like, I was falling prey to these Instagram ads and it was just the dumbest shit too. And I'm like, oh my God, how do they do this? Well, it's through a lot of social comparison, especially something like Instagram, which is all about social comparison, right? Highly curated, right? Virality and visibility too. Yeah.

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So when hierarchies are calibrated like in real time, like when you're in a group, a small group, it takes time to

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to climb up the social ladder, if you will, it takes time. It takes positioning. It takes intimate knowledge with people online. Like something can just go viral right away. And then all of a sudden that just shakes up the whole, the whole ecosystem that you're in. Maybe, maybe you go viral and like all your friends are like, Oh, look at Mr. Big britches here or something like that. Right. Or maybe you go viral for the wrong reasons too. That's another consequence of all of this as well. Yeah.

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I would say, though, too, one of the biggest things is kind of a context shift that modern digital technologies provide. You go back to the similarity principle that I've brought up a couple times about that Fessinger came up with in a social comparison theory. Yeah.

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Um, when we lack objective measures of how to, how to measure ourself, we compare ourselves to similar people. Your brain doesn't know the difference that when you're scrolling online, I know this sounds weird, but your brain does not know the difference between your peers and your non-peers on that. So if you're following celebrities or you're following somebody who's doing the craziest things and the people who do like the wildest, first of all, they're curated in a certain way to make you make you think that they're one way or not. Um, yeah.

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Your brain just doesn't – it can't distinguish between who your peer network is and who you're seeing on a screen. That's how dumb our brains are, I guess, to a certain extent. Yeah.

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So this is like it's constant upward comparison that we're subjected to. Right. And usually not the good kind. Yeah. Or it's very easy to not because you're just sitting there. You're not active in any sort of way. You're seeing other people be active in a socially upward way and you're not part of it. So it's very easy to be like, well, I'm not like that. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

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It can construct kind of a – it can lead to – it can enable a constructive rivalry with others. But I think you have to be very, very conscious about curating your feeds and all that. Yeah. I will say this.

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I do think the feeds are getting better at matching your interests. This is kind of where I wanted to go with you, yeah. Yeah. It is interesting. I do feel like things are shifting over the last couple years. They're getting better in some ways, but definitely not in all ways. Like worse in others, I think. But I do think one of the things that they are getting better at is adapting to each individual user's interests. Like everything you're describing about like the –

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Constant comparison with like strangers and the just this massive sea or like being this like globalized comparison to all these people around the planet that I have nothing to do with. I definitely feel less of that these days. Yeah. I used to. Yeah. But I do feel much more pure comparison. Oh, interesting. So and I think that's because.

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my algorithms on each platform have become very narrowly focused on the things that I really care about, that I'm really interested in. So whether it's video games, podcasting, writing books, personal development, growth, psychology, you know, it's, that's pretty much like those things I just listed, music, those things I listed are probably like 80, 90% of all of my feeds across all platforms. And so now I am being compared to people for things that I do care about. Yeah. And...

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I think that's both good and bad. Sure, sure. On the one hand, I do find more inspiration than I used to, right? Like there is really cool stuff that I'm exposed to that I'm like, oh my God, it's so cool, I found this person and I'm gonna learn a bunch of things. But on the other hand, because I'm now primarily being exposed to people who are doing the same things I'm doing,

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it is easier to judge myself for stuff. Like, I don't know. I think back to, you know, what Instagram used to be, say, six or eight years ago. It was just, like, beautiful vacation photos, beautiful people, like, crazy, amazing feats, stunts, all this stuff. I never really cared about that. Like, sure, maybe if you look at it enough times, you're like, wow, my life's kind of lame and boring. But, like,

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I don't know. I don't think that had like a lasting effect. Whereas I think now because it is so curated and we're so locked into, right. Oh, these are all the people who are doing the things that I care about, but they're doing them way better than I am. I think that starts to run the risk of like, Oh man, I'm such a loser. Yeah. Where do you even start? Yeah. Yeah.

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Well, where do you think it's going then, too? Because, you know, there's a lot of data coming out right now that, like, Gen Z, they're not on social media as much. They're playing video games instead, and there's always a social component to those that they use. Yep. And you've said before that social media is way more media than it is social now. Yeah. That's a big difference from, you know, early social media. It was…

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It was your peers to a certain extent. And then you might throw a celebrity or two on there. But now it seems like it's people in far-flung places that you have nothing to do with and celebrities. And the 1% of people who make the content is all getting served.

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It's interesting. One of the things, you know, I had a long conversation with Jonathan Haidt last year, who's wrote The Anxious Generation. He's like really been spearheading this whole area of like social media, digital life, mobile phones, mental health, especially in young people. I mean, overall, I'm like very sympathetic to his cause and I agree with him on a lot of points. But it is funny. I remember talking to him. I remember like going through all of his research and then having the conversation with him.

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There's a lag here. Like the social media world changes so fast. Right. The reality today is completely different than it was in 2023 or 2022. And but most of the research that's coming out today was done in 2023 or 2022. And then most of the research that he wrote about, first of all, he wrote it last year, but he wrote it like two, three years ago. Yeah.

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And then the research that he wrote his book based on came out two to three years before that. So he's working off of like the 2020 version of social media, which was completely different. Yeah. It's completely different algorithms, different use cases, different audiences. TikTok had like maybe 10% of the users that it has today at the time. So it is so different. It is becoming more media than it is becoming social. And I actually think from a mental health perspective, that's a good thing. Yeah. Because I think when...

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When you get on an app, if you were consuming content and your perception of it is that it's a celebrity, it's not like a real person, it's not a peer, it's not somebody that you can actually compare yourself to, I think that's relatively innocuous for your self-esteem and mental health. Like, for instance, when we were kids growing up, I never went and saw Mission Impossible and was like, man, I'm such a loser. Right, yeah. Like, I can't scale a cliff with one hand tied behind my back. I'm like, I'm so lame. Nobody's ever going to like me.

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No, it was when – like if you look at where all the negative mental health effects are happening –

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They generally happen with young people and young people primarily use social media, not as a form of media, but as a form of socializing. They use it to keep in touch with the kids at school. They're on Snapchat. They're on WhatsApp. They're posting TikToks to each other. And that's where you see a lot of these negative effects. Yeah. When you get into the older generations, people like us who kind of just get on and passively scroll. Like I basically use Instagram the same way I used to use television.

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Like I used to come home from school, I'd turn on the TV and I would just kind of passively leave it on and not really think about it. And it would just kill time or like help me relax or whatever. I use Instagram the exact same way these days. And I definitely don't feel that comparison or pressure the way I used to say with Facebook 10 years ago. And Facebook 10 years ago or 15 years ago at this point

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It was all my friends, all my friends, friends, and all my peer group, all the people I went to college with all the people, you know, people in the same industry as me. And so when I saw them doing cool shit, I was like, oh man, Becky from English class is living in Switzerland. Like, ah, I'm so jealous. You know, it was like that stuff actually hit and hurt a little bit. Whereas like now I get on Instagram and it's like, I don't know, some, some guys dog parachuting out of a.

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flying van or something. I'm like, whatever. Right. This is fun for five seconds. Swipe to the next thing. Goes back to what we were talking about. You will negatively evaluate somebody else who's in the same domain as you value or are operating in. We measure others by the way we measure ourselves. Right. And so when we're more exposed to people who are either in the same peer group or in a... Sorry, I'm like totally hijacking your section here. No, no, no.

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No, I wanted to ask you about this because when I was going through the research for this, I'm like, yeah, we've been talking about this for a decade. You know, like we. Yeah. And a lot of the research I found was from about a decade ago. It's funny because. OK, so we did two or three episodes on this on the old subtle art podcast a few years ago. We did. I did the Jonathan Haidt episode last year with him.

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which I really enjoyed. He and I had a great conversation. And it's funny because this is actually one of the things I told him is I was like, I was like, dude, my whole business is on social media. I'm like, it is different. It's completely every two years. There's a huge. It's all different. Yeah, it's all different. And and he was like actually really curious about that. He was he was like, oh, how has it changed? Like I explained to him, I'm like, dude, the for you feed. Most of this research was done when the for you feed didn't exist. Right. Right. Right. TikTok. Yeah.

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And this is what we're talking about, right? The For You feed changed all of this, right? Like now you're actually – the majority of the content on most social platforms is people you've never heard of and that you'll never see. And so there is, I think, a separation. I think with the For You feed, you're actually less likely to make social comparisons. But because it is in the same domain that you're in –

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you know, it changes the nature of the comparison. And you start, now it's not just like a random anonymous person in some part of the world like doing something cool that you're like, oh man, I'll never do that. Now it's like, oh, this is a thing I really care about. Like I'm a guitar player. And like, I can't tell you how many times some fucking 18 year old shows up on my feed and he is a god. He's an absolute god. There's some good guitar players. I'm like, dude. It's not a bad thing these days. And every time I see one of them, I'm like, I'm so glad I quit music.

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Yeah. Yeah. I'll finish up my hijack here and then I'll hand it back to you. So my, my theory with this,

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And I have no data to back this up, but this is kind of where my head's at with the social stuff these days. Like I said, I think you're mostly seeing the deleterious effect with the younger generation. Younger generation primarily uses it to socialize. They're not – high schoolers aren't getting on and scrolling through people's Europe vacations and cool –

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television clips from South Korea or whatever, like young people are spending most of their time sending TikToks to each other, following each other, sending Snapchats to each other. And I do think the social media as a form of social communication, I actually think the initial, the initial intention of social media, which was to connect everybody digitally, um, is actually what fucks us up. And because it's,

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that's when you're getting everybody's highlight reels. So it's like, let's say you're in a WhatsApp group with everybody from your high school. Everything that's getting posted is everybody's best moment or worst moment. So you're only being exposed to all of your peers at their absolute best or their absolute worst. And those are the people that you actually do care about. Those are the people that you actually are basing your self-esteem on.

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not some random dude in Switzerland or whatever. Yeah. And, and because you're being exposed to the extremes of their experience, you are going to get a very skewed and fucked up perception. On top of that, um, there is the permanence aspect. And this is, this was the big thing that, that Jonathan Haidt brings up that I think is huge and like completely understudied and underappreciated. And still a problem. Yeah. A massive problem. Has been a problem and still a problem.

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Massive problem. So when you and I were in high school, if we went up to a girl at a dance and like awkwardly asked her out and got shot down, we would be really embarrassed for, you know, maybe 20 minutes. We would be embarrassed. You know, maybe there's like four or five other kids in.

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in the vicinity. Yeah, and they're like, ooh, Drew got shot down. It's embarrassing in front of them. Maybe some people talk a little bit of shit at school the next Monday, but then that's it. It's gone. A week later, nobody remembers. Nobody cares. You go on, you ask the next girl, and you learn a very important fact of life, which is that rejection doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It sucks, but it's like nobody remembers. None of it matters. Today...

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If you get rejected and it's being filmed, which it often is, that gets posted to the school WhatsApp group or it gets posted on somebody's TikTok. It gets sent around the school. Everybody's commenting. Everybody's trashing you. And then it's fucking there forever. Yeah. Yeah.

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Sophomore year, junior year, senior year, people are still, people can bring, anytime somebody wants to rag on you, anytime somebody wants to diminish you, shit on you, it gets brought back up. And so what do young people do? They become risk averse. They stop taking chances. They stop asking each other out. They stop going to parties. They stop doing drugs. They stay at home. They play video games together. Yeah. Yeah.

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Yeah. And, uh, they, they get off social media. Yeah. They're starting to, they're starting to now. They're starting to. Yeah. Or like you were saying, it's going more private than to, you know, whatever it is, WhatsApp groups or, or, or whatever, because that the risk is so high. Same thing like, um, you know, all these, uh, like VR glasses that are coming out that have cameras on them. Yeah. And so you don't know that like now. Yeah.

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Think about that. If those become so ubiquitous within just a few years, nobody's even going to want to leave their house at some point. Dude, I like – And forget the privacy concerns. I didn't realize how little people care about privacy. But forget all of that. Just like the – The social – The risk of going viral for the wrong reasons. That – so, okay. Okay.

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I agree. I don't think people actually care about privacy. I think people care about that. Yeah, yeah. And it's like I have yet to meet somebody who's like wearing the meta glasses like in a social situation. But if and when I do, I'm going to be like, dude, take that shit off. Yeah. Yeah. Don't do that. But I think everybody senses that so nobody wears them. Right? Because it's like everybody knows. Because it completely changes the dynamic. If I have any inkling that I'm being recorded…

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I'm going to completely censor myself and change how I present myself, especially if I'm around people I don't know. Right. It's also like, why are you recording this?

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It's interesting. So there's an AI product. It got massive funding, like raised tens of millions of dollars. It's called friend.com. And it's super fascinating. So basically what it is is it's a wearable. It's like a necklace that you put on. It records everything. It records everything.

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Like everything you listen to, everybody you talk to, where you go, everything. And then basically the idea is that it collects all the data on your life, on your day, whatever. And then anytime you're lonely, you can just talk to it. And it's an AI. And it can be your friend.

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And this this company like ran a massive promotional campaign like billboards all over L.A., New York, like just Times Square, all this like crazy, you know, production quality stuff being posted going viral.

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And it's funny if you go to the app store, A, like nobody's downloading it and B like it's, it has like a two star rating because people are just like, fuck this. Like, like, like do you really want to ruin the last thing that we have, which is like face to face in person spaces? Yeah. Like it's already, everything else has already been ruined, right? The last sanctuary we have is when we're in a room together alone with no devices. So like now you want to ruin that too. Yeah.

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They're going to try to figure out a way. They'll find a way. They'll find a way. Yeah. So, okay, where do you think that's going in terms of social comparison if we all, if AI does take over the world, right? I mean, if we do, there are some people out there who think actually what we're about to do is go back to a time where we do converse more face-to-face and we do, we live much more like our ancestors did, only with a lot more technology and a lot more safety. Yeah.

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Um, do you think that's, uh, do you think that's around the corner or at least in the future at some point? It's basically going to come down to two things. Do you have enough impulse control slash lack of social anxiety to force yourself out of the house into these communities, into these events, into these environments to build a healthy social life, uh, to maintain your sanity and your happiness? Um, do you think that's, uh, do you think that's around the corner or at least in the

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And I think that's going to become much more important. It's going to become much more reinforced and encouraged. And I think it's even going to become more of a status symbol. If you actually have places to go in person full of people who you like and respect and like and respect you, like it's going to be a bit of a status symbol. Then I think there's going to be a portion of the population that just like succumbs to the dopamine madness. Yeah.

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doesn't have the impulse control, has too much social anxiety. And it's, I think there's gonna be a very clear delineation between the two because it's like both are spirals. One is an upward spiral, one's a downward spiral, right? It's like the more sucked in and compulsive you get with all the dopamine madness, the more socially anxious you're gonna become, the more distracted you're gonna become, the more focused you're gonna lack, and the harder it's gonna be to get out of it. Similarly, it's like the more you get out of the house, the more

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social life you have, the more relationships you have, um, the more confidence and self-esteem you're going to have to like go out and do it more. So that's kind of my take. Like I, I could keep going, but like we're going to get way off topic. No, no, no. I feel I, I've, I've felt the tug to, and let me see if I can bring this back. Yeah. Um, I've felt the tug to, um, because even though like I'm not really on a lot of social media, I got YouTube elected, you know, YouTube shorts. They're pretty addictive. They're it's

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Um, and I think it was, it was one or two weeks ago. Um, I had some friends that were like, Hey, we're going to this. There's like a little concert. It's actually, it's like somebody's house. Who's kind of built like a, like a, a backyard. That's like a big compound for concerts and stuff like that. And it's small concerts, but still.

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And I felt the tug because I was like, I kind of just want to stay home and scroll. And when I scroll, what I'm doing, especially like on YouTube shorts and stuff, it's it is it's other podcasters. A lot of podcasters. Oh, I should. I want to do something like that. Yeah. Oh, that's a really good way to present something or whatever it is that I do with that. Or it's like, yeah, things I'm really into. And.

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And there is that like dopamine chase that you have. I forced myself. I got out and I was like, I was kind of dreading it almost. And so I get it. Like I, and I'm not, I'm not in it. Like, like younger people. Right. You're, you're pretty, you're pretty limited. Yeah. You're pretty limited in your digital diet. No, I mean, Fernando and I talk about this quite a bit. Like we both feel it. Like it's, it is that, that feeling you just described of like,

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oh, do I have to get up and go to this thing? Yeah. Like we are noticing that we're feeling that very consistently. Yeah. Oh, yeah. With social events. Like it's almost every single day we're like, do we have to go to this dinner? Or like, oh, yeah, we agreed to do this party, didn't we? Yeah.

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And then, and then you go nine times out of 10, we're like, oh my God, I'm so glad we went. You know, luckily, luckily, luckily I've had a few of those in the last few months, like a, like a wedding party. I went to, I went to that concert, a couple other things, a couple of dinners that I went to where there was that tug and I get there and I'm like, oh my God, I'm so glad I came to this. And I got away from my phone and look at this and I had a great time and I connected with people and it was awesome. And I think people are going to see that at some point.

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But then it's funny because then it's like we go back home and then like two days later, it's the exact same thing. Yeah. It's like, ah, should we cancel? Like, do you really want to go? Like, ah, I should make up a reason not to. But it's – Well, there is a comparison. We'll bring this home. There is a comparison element here too, right? Because you're comparing that experience that you might go and do this and it's like, ah, it's going to be like, you know –

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parking's going to suck. There might be some assholes there. There's going to be, you know, all this. I can compare that or I can sit here and I can know that I'm going to get some dopamine hits. I know that I'm going to get some, some, some feedback loops that are just going to keep me hooked. I know what that experience is like. Yes. And I think, especially with like a, with social comparison, that's a, you, you have to think about that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It is a big

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you know, like, okay, first of all, I don't know half the people who are going to be there. Yeah. And, and then maybe in a lot of cases too, it's like some of the people, like, I don't know about you, but like, there's very few people in my life that I have like very, I universally feel good about. Like there are, you know, most people that I know, I'm like, I really like them, but like there's, you know, there's a little thing that bugs me or like, yeah, I hate it when she does that. And it's funny because it's in those moments, you're like, those things kind of get amplified in your head. Yeah.

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And you're like, yeah, that guy. Yeah. So it's – Yeah. I was in an awkward group hug when I went to that concert. So, yeah, that was a little weird. I'm sorry. You had to endure such a thing. That was the only awkward moment there. So that's good. Yeah. You should try living in L.A. Okay. This guy was very drunk. Yeah.

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Anything else we want to hit on? I feel like we just threw half of this section, half of our research out the window. We kind of did. I mean, the prescriptive stuff, I don't know if we want to get too far into that. Like, since I have pulled back from so much social media, I definitely have noticed. Here's the thing about it, though, too, is that I'm a person who is very much prone to social comparison. Okay? And I notice that more and more. I mean, we all are. Sure. As we've been harping on this whole time.

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I've just noticed that I don't... There's certain areas of my life where I just don't have as much of that anymore. I don't have as much of...

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a comparison mindset around it anymore. It's usually around, a lot of it is around like the people I hang out with. It's like, oh, is this person cool? Is this person not cool? How is this person going to affect my social standing or anything like that? Maybe that's just getting older too. I don't know. Or, you know, just things that I have, like material possessions. I don't see a whole lot of that anymore because I'm not inundated with really highly targeted ads as much, you know? So, yeah.

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I mean, I think if you are like taking a break is good. Sure. You know, I know that's the standard advice, but yeah, I don't know. It's just going to be really interesting to see where this goes and how...

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how we're supposed to navigate it. I don't know. You got any advice on that? I mean, you're on social media a lot. The other side of it though too, is that recently, like I logged on to a social media network that I forgot that I even had an account not too long ago. I was like, what was that? Like, I forget what this is even like. Yeah. I found some really cool stuff on there.

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I was like, oh, this is awesome. Again, I think the – Highly tailored. The benefits of social media are largely unconscious and the costs are very conscious. So I think a lot of it goes under the radar. Like I've exposed – I've been exposed to tons of incredible musicians and bands that I love through social media. That is the biggest thing that I miss from social media is I don't find as new music as –

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I've discovered tons of great books. I've heard a bunch of interesting interviews. I've learned so much about business through social media and YouTube. So, I mean, it's, again, there's, like, there are a lot of benefits that kind of go unsung. I will say one last thing, and this kind of ties into the For You feed thing, right? So it's, like, I do think the For You feed has...

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Kind of killed the problem of that global comparison and localized it a little bit more again. But the problem is that that localization is not accurate. It's not reflective of reality in a lot of cases. So I think what has happened since the For You feed is that, okay, each person is getting served a narrow band of content based on the topics that they care about or they're interested in.

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The problem is that it's kind of like the criticism of the news media. It's not that they're not factually correct. It's that they're only presenting you certain facts to shape and mold your perception of an issue. The exact same thing is happening on social media, but it's happening to each one of us individually. So it's – and this –

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it is true politically, but it doesn't have to just be true politically. Like you could be getting served things about nutrition and health that are because it's very much based on your preferences and your viewpoints. You are developing a distorted perception of reality. And therefore you are drawing social comparisons based on something that is not actually accurate or reflective of the thing you actually care about. And, and so I, I see this happen a lot.

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Do you remember like a year or two ago, a bunch of journalists were talking about the vibe session? Yeah. Or a bunch of economists were talking about the vibe session, which is basically like the economy was doing great, but when you surveyed people, they thought it was doing horribly. And it was very interesting because they pointed out that generally speaking, like –

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Consumer surveys have been historically accurate predictors of recessions and how well the economy is doing, except for in the last three or four years. And I personally think it's the for you feed because the people who are currently down on their luck, you know, lost a job or things aren't going super well or like inflation hit them hard or whatever. They are being curated content and information that reflects that reality back to them.

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And so they are erroneously developing a perception that the whole world is experiencing this. Because everybody on their feed is showing up is complaining about inflation too. And everybody else has lost their job that they're watching. And they're getting sort of all this content from people who are complaining about the economic situation. Meanwhile, like the actual data is showing that things are fine. Right.

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So I think that's like a microcosm of the issue. And you can run that through. There's tons of political issues that we're literally to a point where that people on different sides of a political issue literally don't agree on the facts. Right. Like there are like different facts for each side. And you don't really know what to make of it.

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Yeah, and like I said, it's going to be crazy going forward. It's just going to be – like one difference I think that you just pointed out from the like new media, so social media you're saying is there's more media than social now. Using it – if you're using it like TV used to be or whatever, there wasn't – that wasn't the case. There was kind of one narrative that everybody just kind of had, right? I mean, yes, as cable television got more channels and like all of that, sure, there was dissemination of different opinions, but –

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Now it's like everybody's got their individual little universe. And I guess one thing that does flow from that is that you do have some power over the curation of who you are comparing yourself to in that ecosystem too. If it's more distributed, now you can go find your little pocket. Your little niche. Everybody can have their own little universe. There's trade-offs there again too, like you're saying. But you can curate. If you're more conscious and intentional about it, you can curate. Yeah.

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who you're comparing yourself to. And you can and should also, it's the same way you can and should curate the people in your life, right? Like to bring this full circle into how to compare yourself to better people for better reasons. Part of it is simply surrounding yourself by better people, by people you admire, by people that you want to emulate, the people that make you a better person. You know, ultimately Aristotle, as usual, had it right. You know, it's like,

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This machinery is part of your brain, so you might as well leverage it. And the way you leverage that is to find people you admire and you want to emulate and who make you a better person. Yeah. I guess that's the 80-20. Do you think there's another 80-20? I think we did kind of cover all of it right there. Yeah. Yeah. I mean –

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You know, like, sure, you could argue, oh, compare yourself with yourself, your past self. You can argue all of those things, all the things we went over. Sure. If those resonate with you, go for it. But at the end of the day, I think it is just a matter of intentionality. Yeah. Yeah. I think you can and should compare yourself to your past self, but I don't think you can only compare yourself. It's impossible. Yeah. No, no. You will always be compared. It's part of your nature. Yeah. And you're going to do both.

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That's probably an area that you should set a boundary in your life. Either expose yourself to those people less or take yourself out of those situations to a certain extent. Hidden costs of social comparison, of comparing ourselves well. I will say this.

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toxic relationships thrive on unhealthy social comparison. Right. Right. Like if you look at kind of what's at the core of a toxic relationship, it's often, you know, an insecure individual who is measuring themselves, comparing themselves in an unhealthy way to somebody else. Yes. Yeah. So I feel like, you know, I guess that's not a cost. I guess, you know, when you set boundaries with unhealthy people in your life, there's often fallout and drama. So.

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I guess maybe that's a cost, but is there a cost to comparing yourself more health, like more healthfully? I try, I've racked my brain and I, because if we start with the premise that it's going to happen no matter what, like, unless you can completely get rid of it, which I don't think you can, I don't think you want to, first of all. Yeah. Cause then you're, you have no identity at that point, I think. So yeah, I don't know. I think this is one of those where it's like, just get good at it.

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Yeah. You know? It's a skill issue. It is 100% a skill issue. It's a skill issue. Yeah. It's not an understanding issue. It's a skill issue. Right. Any takeaways for you personally? Yeah. Okay. So I mentioned this earlier. I kind of – I let the cat out of the bag already. But the curiosity thing I think is what really –

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Yeah. It really resonated with me in this and doing research around this. It's not that, like, there is that fork in the road you can take, and that fork in the road is curiosity. Yeah. When you see something and you are envious of someone else, get curious about it. Yeah.

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is it about them that led them to this place that you want to get to? What is it about the decisions they made? What is it about their character? What is it about the way they see the world? Yeah. Like get curious about those kinds of things, but then also get curious about like the thing that you're comparing yourself to, the specific thing. If it's because they're successful in some area or they've accomplished something in some area that you want to.

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Dig down underneath that, get real curious because there's probably a value underneath that. Yeah, it's interesting as you're saying that. It's like, have you ever had the experience of, maybe you see something online and it really bothers you and then you like stop and ask yourself, you're like, why does this bother me? Yes, oh yeah, oh yeah. I've had that happen so many times. I'm like, what is this? Like, what is it about this that pisses me off? Like, I don't understand. Like, why do I care what this person's doing? Right, right. Yeah, that's super interesting. I would say too, like for me,

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The big aha here was like the connection of the values piece. It's funny too because, I mean, it's one of those things that it makes sense and it feels obvious in hindsight. But I definitely...

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I feel like this is something that I've always been very good at. Like, I've always been very good at not comparing myself to people I don't really give a shit about. And then I also feel like the people I do compare myself to, it's like in a very healthy way. It's because I admire them or I want to get better. And –

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And yeah, I think it's really at the heart of that is an understanding of what you want and what you care about and what's worth caring about. I think if you don't have clarity around the values piece, then that's when you fall into just like,

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becoming a validation junkie. Right. That's when you're grabbing values from all around you. That's when you, that's when you, that's when you just start adopting the values of the people around you. Right. It's like, well, I don't know what I care about, so I'm just going to do what other people want. Right. So I'll just care about what they will, what they care about. Right. Cause that'll make, that'll get me, that'll make me feel liked and appreciated and whatever. So I think ultimately, you know, like one of the pieces of advice that,

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I've often given at talks is like, you know, the best way to stop worrying about what other people think about you is to have something more important than what other people think about you. Right. Right. Like I remember I was I was giving a talk in Australia and a young woman got up and asked this question and. Yeah.

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And she was like, yeah, I just care so much and I'm like very sensitive and I worry about all these things. And like she gave me some scenario, I think she was like a university student. She gave me like some scenario that like she was like kept her awake at night. And I was like, okay, it's like, let's do a thought experiment. You know, that situation that you just described that you were embarrassed in,

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you wanted to die with embarrassment. It's like, okay, let's imagine your mother had terminal cancer. And the only cure requires you to go through that embarrassing experience. How willing would you be to go through that experience? Sign me up, right? Exactly. It's like, do it in a heartbeat. And I just think it's like, that's an extreme example that illustrates a principle, which is that if you have something going on in your life that feels so important to you and that you care about very deeply and you like, it...

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it needs to matter more than other people's approval, then you will no longer be dictated by other people's approval. Yeah. Just one more thing on the values thing too. When you're clarifying that value, like if you admire somebody, why do I admire them? Or why am I envious of them? Whatever it is. A lot of times the value isn't the thing that you actually think it is, right? Like for instance, for a long time I was like, I wanna make a whole bunch of money, right? And I wanna be super, super successful.

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I look at that and there's some people who want to do that because they want the validation of others or they want to feel loved. Me, I was like, I just want the freedom that these people have. I look at that and I'm like, these people can do whatever the hell they want. That's amazing. Right? And so there's probably like there's that underlying value is usually one step further than you think. Yeah. It's one layer deeper. Yeah. Yeah.

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Well, that's it for this episode, everybody. As always, check out the PDF guide, softpodcast.com slash social comparison. Be sure to like and subscribe. Follow us on whatever platform you're listening to. Give us a great rating because Drew and I need validation. Absolutely. We compare ourselves mercilessly to the other podcasts in our space. And if we don't have enough five-star reviews, Drew and I will not sleep tonight.

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sleep anyway. Yeah, Drew never sleeps. So anyway, please leave a review. Thank you for tuning in and we will see you next time. Bye guys.