How social comparison turns an ordinary winding path into a private verdict

Part 6 of a series on vocation, giftedness, and meaningful work. Click below for the previous essays:
Vocation Is a Conversation (Part 1)
Nothing Good is Ever Wasted (Part 2)
The Map and the Compass (Part 3)
Teaching the Pause (Part 4)
What to Do When the Room Is Empty (Part 5)

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By Jill Szoo Wilson
Writer | Theatre Artist | Educator

It is eleven at night, and you are scrolling through your phone before bed, not really looking for anything, when a former classmate’s post appears: a promotion, a new title, a photograph in front of an unfamiliar building. Something tightens in your chest before you’ve even finished reading the caption. You close the app a minute later, and the feeling stays.

This moment is common enough that it barely needs describing, yet it is worth pausing on, because the feeling it produces gets treated, almost universally, as a personal failing. Something wrong with your ambition, your gratitude, your capacity to be happy for someone else. The truth is closer to something structural, a mechanism with a name and a fairly long research history behind it.

In 1954, the psychologist Leon Festinger proposed an idea that still anchors most research on this topic: people evaluate their own abilities and situations by comparing themselves to others, and they lean on this comparison hardest exactly when an objective measure is missing. If you want to know how fast you can run a mile, a stopwatch settles the question instantly. Whether your career is going well is a much fuzzier kind of measurement, and the mind fills that gap with the nearest substitute it can find: other people, and whatever version of them happens to be visible.

Festinger’s original theory also distinguished between two directions this comparison can run. Looking at someone doing worse, a downward comparison, tends to bring temporary relief. Looking at someone doing better, an upward comparison, tends to sting, though it can also motivate, depending on how attainable the gap feels. The internet, it turns out, skews the sample heavily in one direction. It is built, by the incentives of what gets shared, to run almost entirely upward.

Here is the part worth slowing down on, because it explains more than the feeling itself. A person who gets promoted posts about it. A person stuck eight months into a discouraging job search rarely does. A person who finally resolves a two-year stretch of uncertainty might write a single line about it after the fact, once it has turned into a good story. The eight months themselves rarely make it online, since there is little to announce yet, little that reads as an update. What this means is that the sample of career news arriving in your feed every day skews heavily away from how careers actually go, filtered down to the good news, submitted voluntarily by the very people experiencing it.

Researchers have measured the downstream effect of exactly this kind of filtered exposure. A 2017 study by Pisarik and colleagues found that college students who used social media to track how their peers’ careers were unfolding reported measurably higher anxiety as a direct result, anxiety specifically about their own trajectory rather than general worry. A separate study by Haferkamp and Krämer found something even more precise: after viewing a stream of unusually successful career profiles, people perceived a wider gap between where they actually stood and where they wanted to be, compared to people who viewed a more ordinary stream. The comparison itself, in other words, moved the goalposts. It did more than make people feel bad. It temporarily changed their own assessment of how far they had left to go.

A natural question follows: does this fade once a person has some career under their belt, once the twenty-two year old anxiety about a first job gives way to actual experience? A 2021 study tracking Japanese employees over the course of a week suggests otherwise. Simply viewing a colleague’s positive career post, tracked day by day, was enough to trigger measurable frustration through the same comparison mechanism, in employees well past the entry-level stage this series has mostly focused on so far. Seniority, it turns out, changes very little about how this particular mechanism operates.

This is the same distortion the rest of this series has been trying to correct, arriving through a slightly different channel. What appears in a feed is nearly always the arrival, rarely the walk. A single, polished result stands in for years of interior weather that the same person, in a private conversation, would likely describe very differently. Reading a stream of arrivals, one after another, quietly rebuilds the myth this series opened by naming: the idea that other people’s lives move directly and cleanly toward a single, discoverable destination, while yours, uniquely, keeps wandering.

The same 2021 research contains a finding worth sitting with because it explains its own mechanism rather than simply reporting an outcome. Ordinary daily interaction with other people, in person rather than through a feed, measurably reduced the career frustration that online comparison produced. The likely reason becomes clear once you consider what a feed filters out that a real conversation keeps in. A friend describing her week naturally includes the slow Tuesday, the argument with a coworker, and the job application still sitting unanswered. In person, you get the fuller sample. Online, you only ever get the highlight.

This looks less like a coincidence and more like a natural correction. In-person contact restores something the feed removes by design: the boring, unfinished, in-between material that makes up most of an actual life. That material is unglamorous, but it is also the only honest baseline for comparison, since it is the only version of other people’s lives that resembles the version you are living yourself, mostly ordinary and rarely photographed.

The point here is smaller than an argument against feeds or against celebrating other people’s genuine successes. It is simply that the comparison itself deserves a little more scrutiny before it gets treated as evidence about your own life. A feed shows arrivals. The walk stays mostly off-screen. And the walk, uneven and largely unposted, is where the actual conversation between a person’s gifts has been happening the entire time.

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Further reading: Leon Festinger’s original 1954 paper, A Theory of Social Comparison Processes, introduces the underlying concept. The 2021 study on career frustration and companionship, published in Frontiers in Psychology, covers the comparison and buffering research in full.