In psychology, the human drive to compare ourselves to others is called “social comparison theory” introduced in the 1950s by social psychologist Leon Festinger. He pointed out that humans are driven to evaluate and know the truth about themselves, and desire a way to define themselves. And how do we achieve this, beyond our own personal analysis? By then comparing our abilities and opinions to those of others. Part of Festinger’s hypotheses was one that stated that we are all also prone, when it comes to looking at our abilities, to look upward. We want to do better and better, so choose to compare ourselves to people slightly ahead of us in skill.
I experienced this so call social comparison more after my retirement. I felt like a runner running his final lap and realizing that he was behind. He was to far from the podium position, not even the top ten. Apparently my feeling is pretty much driven my human tendency. Of course being a retiree would make things more dramatic, that final lap feeling.
My knee jerk reaction is avoiding contact with friends who are more successful - or at least look like so. Pretty easy to do as they did not reach out to me. I just skip their Facebook or Linkedin feeds. No worries, Next would to ignore reunion invitation. All of which are easy to do and apparently no one would bother to ask about my disappearance. We all have life outside those things.
Of course I challenge myself about my weird behavior. Why couldn't I just accept that people have different luck in life. Some eventually are more richer, appear to be more successful, more luckier etc. Some would be situated on the left side of the bell curve. That is the nature of statistic. Such thinking does not work because I still ask - why can't I be on right side of the curve? Why not me?
In the eighties, a new concept was introduced called “downward social comparison”. This is the habit of comparing ourselves to those who are worse off.
Yes indeed we could always point our view to different direction: downward ! We could say: yes my friends are more successful but in this whole world or within a radius of 5 KM there are many people would would like to trade their lives with mine this very minute. Fact is even my so called successful friends are somewhere to the left of the curve looking from higher level. I am sure that they would be nowhere in comparison to the top 50 richest people in my country, never mind in the world.
Comparing downward does not in itself completely cures my tendency to feel less fortunate. However apparently there are things we could do to help ourselves in dealing with nagging tendency. Firstly, practice gratitude. It was a trend for a while that then went off the radar, but gratitude is actually evidence based, proven to up your moods and even help your sleep.
Secondly, use comparison for better perspective. If you must compare, use it to widen your perspective. This can be downward comparison (I think my life is hard, but to someone in a Third World country I live like a queen) but also can be comparing upwards if used positively. For example, I am terrified of giving this presentation because I’m terrible at them, but it’s not like I am an actor give an Oscar speech in front of millions, it’s just to my colleagues.
Lastly compare yourself to yourself. Nobody needs to compare their adult body to their teenage body, but comparing your life in general now to your life in general then can be productive. Too often we forget to see how far we’ve come.
https://www.harleytherapy.co.uk/counselling/comparing-yourself-to-others.htm
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