This week, while on vacation in Mexico, Teresa and I found ourselves sitting poolside with two couples in their seventies. As the conversation unfolded, so did their stories.
Playing on an Olympic hockey team in Paris.
Skiing the Alps.
Living on a beach in Morocco.
Building successful businesses.
Traveling the world.
Rubbing shoulders with famous people.
They spoke with ease, laughter, and the settled confidence of people who had lived full lives. And quietly—almost without noticing it happen—I began to compare.
My life feels small.
Mundane.
Unadventurous.
Uninteresting.
On the walk back to our room, I shared this with Teresa. She stopped me almost immediately. She reminded me—firmly and kindly—that this story I was telling myself wasn’t just untrue, it was self-absorbed and deeply ungrateful. A momentary lapse of perspective.
She was right.
But that moment stayed with me. Not because it was dramatic—but because it was so ordinary. It made me realize just how easily and how subtly comparison slips in.
The Seductive Pull of Comparison
Comparison rarely announces itself loudly. It doesn’t usually show up as jealousy or bitterness right away. More often, it whispers:
Why hasn’t your life looked like that?
Why didn’t you do more?
Why didn’t you choose differently?
Years ago, I heard an axiom that I’m increasingly convinced holds more truth than we like to admit: Comparison leads to competition. And competition kills community.
It’s easy to dismiss this by pointing to “healthy competition.” But that’s not what this is about.
The kind of competition I am talking about isn’t focused on excellence or growth for everyone. It’s about rank. About measuring worth. About deciding—consciously or not—who is ahead, who is behind, and where we fall on the invisible ladder.
And when competition is born from comparison, it doesn’t just strain our relationships with others. It quietly corrodes our relationship with ourselves.
Why This Is Harder Than Ever
We live in a culture saturated with opportunities for comparison—many of them embedded in systems that quietly depend on our dissatisfaction.
From social media feeds and reality television to LinkedIn success stories, wellness culture, parenting milestones, relationship highlight reels, and travel narratives, we are constantly invited to measure our lives against carefully edited versions of others.
Most of us don’t do this with any intent to deceive. We simply share the best moments, the best angles, the most flattering narratives—the highlight reels of our lives.
But here’s the problem: we live inside our own unfinished, complicated, sometimes painful, sometimes beautiful, and often in-between inner worlds… and then compare them to the external highlights of others.
That’s not just unfair.
It’s psychologically destabilizing.
Comparison doesn’t inspire us—it robs us.
It robs us of contentment.
It robs us of joy.
It erodes self-esteem.
And over time, it robs us of connection—both with ourselves and with others.
What The Science Tells Us
Psychologically, comparison is deeply wired into us. Our brains are constantly scanning for social cues—where we belong, how we measure up, whether we are safe or valued.
Social psychologist Leon Festinger, who first articulated social comparison theory, argued that humans are wired to understand themselves in relation to others.
In other words, comparison itself isn’t the problem. It’s one of the primary ways humans make sense of who they are and where they belong.
But modern comparison is fundamentally different from historical comparison.
For most of human history, we compared ourselves to a relatively small group of people—family, neighbors, coworkers, community members. Today, we compare ourselves to thousands of people at once, most of whom are presenting highly curated versions of their lives.
Research also suggests that when we compare, we tend to look upward rather than downward—measuring ourselves against people we perceive as more successful, happier, or more accomplished, particularly in online environments where “better-than-me” examples are far more visible.
As a result, upward social comparison is often associated with:
Lower self-esteem
Increased anxiety and depression
Reduced life satisfaction
Heightened shame and self-criticism
Social media intensifies this by collapsing context. We’re no longer comparing our full, complicated inner lives to the whole lives of others—we’re comparing our lived reality to everyone else’s.
Neuroscience helps explain why this feels so destabilizing.
Studies show that social comparison can activate the brain’s threat and stress systems, rather than its learning or motivation systems. As neuroscientist Ethan Kross notes:
“When we compare ourselves to others in ways that make us feel inferior, the brain responds much like it does to physical pain or threat.”
Instead of fostering growth, comparison often narrows us—making gratitude, creativity, and genuine connection harder to access.
In short:
Comparison doesn’t make us better.
It makes us smaller.
What Comparison Ultimately Costs Us
Comparison pulls us out of presence. It keeps us from appreciating the life we’re actually living.
It dulls gratitude. It replaces curiosity with judgment—of others and ourselves. And perhaps most tragically, it fractures community.
When comparison turns into competition, others become benchmarks to surpass rather than companions to walk with. We stop celebrating one another and start measuring. We stop listening—and start ranking.
Connection can’t survive in that environment.
Practicing Freedom from Comparison
Comparison may be instinctual—but it isn’t inevitable. Here are a few grounded, practical ways to loosen its grip:
1. Name It Without Shaming Yourself
The moment you notice comparison, simply name it: “I’m comparing right now.” Awareness interrupts the spiral. Shame fuels it.
2. Anchor Back Into Gratitude
Not forced positivity—but honest gratitude. Ask: What has my life uniquely given me? What depth, wisdom, relationships, or growth have come through paths I didn’t choose?
3. Re-Humanize the Other Person
When you feel comparison rising, gently remind yourself: They have a whole life I cannot see. Every highlight reel has unseen complexity.
4. Limit Inputs That Feed the Cycle
This isn’t about rejecting social media entirely—but about being intentional. Pay attention to what consistently leaves you feeling diminished, and create boundaries around it.
5. Choose Community Over Competition
Celebrate others without measuring yourself against them. Let their story be theirs, not a verdict on yours.
A Different Measure of a Life
A meaningful life is not measured by how impressive it looks from the outside.
It’s measured by depth.
By the quality of our relationships.
By love given and received.
By growth through suffering.
By the courage to stay human in a world obsessed with performance.
Comparison tempts us to live from the outside in. But wholeness is always an inside-out affair. And the moment we step out of comparison, we don’t just recover joy—we recover the best of ourselves.
Until next week,
Jonathan Penner | Co-Founder & Executive Director of LifeApp
Resources To Dig Deeper
Music
Jealousy, Jealousy
Jealousy, Jealousy gives voice to the quiet exhaustion of living in a constant state of comparison. The song captures how curated images—perfect bodies, flawless lives, endless wins—can slowly erode self-worth, even when we know someone else’s success isn’t our failure. It names the inner conflict many of us feel: the tension between understanding this intellectually and still feeling the weight of comparison follow us everywhere, shaping how we see ourselves and our lives.
-Olivia Rodrigo (2:52)
Podcast
Comparing Yourself To Others, Solved
We all compare ourselves to other people—our friends, coworkers, strangers on the internet—and most of the time, it makes us feel like shit. But why do we keep doing it? In this episode of Solved, we dig into the uncomfortable truth behind social comparison, how it quietly ruins our self-worth, and why most of what we envy in others is a projection of our own insecurity. We also get into the brutal paradox of success, the toxic loop of chasing status, and how the constant measurement of our lives against others is one of the dumbest things we do as a species. If you’ve ever felt not good enough or like you’re falling behind, this one’s for you.
-Mark Manson (2:04:21)