The Comparison Trap

September 24, 2026

Why it’s designed to make you lose — and the one comparison that actually helps

A while back, I started learning more about Rick Rubin. He’s a famous music producer. I listened to interviews with him, watched a documentary series with him and Paul McCartney.

I’ll admit it — while I am not generally an envious guy, I did find myself envying Rick a bit. I love music. I always wished I’d had a career in music of some kind. And here’s this guy living in Malibu, got an epic recording studio at home, worked with all these amazing artists, made all this amazing music. He’s really got the life!

But instead of just letting that make me miserable, I took a pause and got curious about it. What’s that actually about?

The more I paid attention to that curiosity, I realized: yeah, I wish I was more connected to music. I wish I had more of a sense of being a creative person. I was envious of the creativity. 

I started practicing the guitar again. And I read Rick’s book on creativity, The Creative Act. And it turns out there are lots of ways in my life that I am creative, that I experience a lot of the same things he experiences when he’s in that flow state, tapped into the creative force of the universe. And the book had some powerful insights about how to enable and support more of those experiences.

So the envy, if I’m curious about it rather than letting it just create suffering, can reveal something I can actually do something about.

That’s what I want to talk about today. The comparison trap, and how to get out of it.

Teddy Roosevelt, back in the late 1800s, called comparison the thief of joy. And that was a long time before Instagram and TikTok and everything else we think of today when we think about the comparison trap. It’s part of the human condition. And it really does make us miserable a lot of the time. The difference now is that with social media, it’s become like a full-time occupation for us.

A lot of us do this constantly. And much of it’s subconscious. You look online, you see someone’s vacation, their house, the promotion they got, something about their relationship on social media, the way they look, the way they dress, their level of fitness. Or it could just be about how at ease some people seem to feel with themselves, which can be such a stark comparison to the way you feel about yourself. You may not be conscious that you’re doing the comparison, but you can feel it. That body contraction. That voice in your head: why not me, why don’t I get to do that, what’s wrong with me, why aren’t I farther along.

And here’s part of what makes it so insidious: What you’re actually doing is comparing the way you feel inside with what someone else is presenting on the outside. Those are two totally different things, but we treat them the same. You’re comparing how you feel about everything in your life — your triumphs, your struggles, your failures, your anxiety at 3am when you can’t go back to sleep, the doubts you have about yourself — to somebody else’s highly curated sharing of a teeny portion of their existence.

It’s not fair at all. It’s a huge mismatch. And yet you’re wondering why you don’t feel better after doing it!

Why do we compare? Some people think it’s vanity, ego, insecurity. But it’s actually wiring, from when we were in tribes tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago. There’s a name for it in psychology: social comparison theory. We evaluate ourselves by comparing ourselves to other people, automatically, especially when we lack objective measures for evaluating ourselves.

Back in tribal times, your world was maybe 100 or 150 people. You needed to know where you stood within that group for survival — could you protect yourself and your tribe, what role would you play. That was an important skill then. It’s not so important now. And it’s really problematic because you’re no longer comparing yourself to dozens or scores of people you actually knew. You’ve got 8 billion people on the planet and millions, even billions, of them available to compare yourself to online! This is a really bad instinct at this point in terms of our wiring and the society we actually live in.

There are two directions this tends to go:

The first is upward comparison — comparing yourself to people who seem to have more, achieve more, do more than you do. This is probably the most common and maybe the most corrosive to self-esteem, because it’s always going to result in feelings of inadequacy. There’s always someone who’s got more. Always. Look at the billionaires — why do they keep wanting more? They’ve got tens of billions of dollars and there’s always someone with more, even briefly. Even Elon Musk, wealthiest person on the planet, and then his stock price dips and he’s not anymore. You’re either always behind somebody or briefly at the top with somebody else about to overtake you.

Even when we set goals and achieve them — the job, the promotion, the raise, the degree — thinking it’s going to bring us so much joy and satisfaction, it doesn’t stick, because as soon as we get there, there’s another point of comparison waiting. What’s the next promotion, the next level of wealth, the next house, the next car. There’s always something new. You don’t get to sit there and enjoy what you achieved for very long before you’re comparing yourself on something else. It’s bizarre, but that’s the way it works. And the gap you’re trying to close between yourself and other people isn’t even real. It’s a figment of our imagination, focused on very limited data and false means of comparison.

The second direction for is downward comparison — comparing yourself to people who seem to have less. This might make you feel better for a moment, a brief sense of relief or superiority. At least I’m not as bad as they are. But it’s temporary, and it’s not real, because it’s not actually an evaluation of how well you’re doing. It’s based on somebody else’s pain and suffering. And it’s corrosive to your empathy, because you start needing other people to be worse off than you to feel okayish. There are two kinds of people in the world — balcony people who cheer you on, and basement people who pull you down. Downward comparison turns you into a basement person, looking for more people doing poorly so you can feel some satisfaction from that. That’s not healthy. That’s not who we want to be.

I lived in the Soviet Union for a couple of years as a diplomat. There was a lot of downward comparison there. Most people were poor, so they were looking for evidence that, as bad as they had it, someone else was worse off than them, or at least no better. And when people did the upward comparison, they looked for ways to pull that person down. If a neighbor got a new car, the response was: how did they get that car, they must have done something wrong, let’s report them to the police or the KGB. They were hoping that the neighbor must have done something corrupt to get the car when they’d been waiting ten years to get their own. I saw firsthand how it destroys a society.

There’s a concept in South Africa, Ubuntu — I am because we are, we are because I am. It’s about interconnectedness. I can’t be safe, happy, successful, fulfilled unless everybody else in my community is, and vice versa. The problem with comparison is it pulls us apart. We stop seeing ourselves as part of a whole, and start seeing our happiness as dependent on being better than other people — not just some other people, better than everybody, at least those we see on social media every day. Otherwise you’re always going to feel like you’re not measuring up. That’s toxic. Really toxic.

I’d argue this isn’t really a self-esteem problem, even though that’s the symptom. It’s a values problem. It’s confusion about who you are, what you believe in, what really matters to you, and who you’re trying to become. It’s measuring yourself by other people’s metrics of success, happiness, beauty — because you haven’t done the work yet to get clarity and commitment to what you actually value.

Once you know your values, what success looks like for you — which probably isn’t going to be the title and the money and all that — you get clarity about what kind of life you’re trying to build, how you want to show up as your best, most authentic self. And once you have that clarity, other people’s lives and what they’re showing don’t matter as much for evaluating your own. You have your own measures now.

For me, it’s always been about impact on other people. I don’t look at social media and get caught up in the big house, the money, the cars. I know what lights me up is making an impact — when somebody says “that resonates with me so much, that helps me so much,” when a client has that aha moment. That’s what I love. So the comparison stuff doesn’t matter so much. Other people’s lives and what they’re portraying online become almost irrelevant data points that don’t match what I’m actually looking for.

When we don’t have that clarity, we absorb other people’s values — or what they seem to be — instead. Their expressions of what they think matters starts to tug at us, pulling us out of alignment with who we really are. It’s an integrity issue at its core.

This connects to my favorite book, The Four Agreements. Don’t take anything personally — not just other people’s literal critique of us, but how other people are living, what they achieve. That has nothing to do with you. It could be interesting data — is there something this is poking at that I value and wasn’t aware of? Be curious about that. Otherwise, it’s not relevant.

And don’t make assumptions. We assume so much about what other people’s lives are really like, whether they’re really happy. We have no idea. I’m constantly hearing about people whose lives looked perfect on the outside and who were feeling terrible on the inside. When I told family and friends that my first marriage was ending, people were shocked. “Oh my god, you guys seemed so happy together.” Our best friends had no idea. You don’t know what people are hiding inside, what they’re actually dealing with. A year and a half ago I lost a lot of weight in a short amount of time because I was very sick. People who didn’t know I was sick would say, “Oh, you look good, lost some weight.” No. I was really sick.

There is one point of comparison that can actually help: comparing yourself with your past self, to see growth. How far you’ve come, what you’ve overcome. Are you more aligned with your values today than you were a year or two ago? More honest, more intentional, more loving? That’s growth. And if there are areas where you feel like you haven’t grown, that’s data you can use to focus on growing there.

That comparison, using your own metrics — what really matters to you, your core values, what gives your life purpose and meaning — that could be helpful. Am I better with sleep than I was a year ago? If not, let me work on getting to bed at the same time every night. That’s within your control and it’ll reap tremendous benefits.

I still have some symptoms from the spinal infection I dealt with a year and a half ago. It would be easy for me to focus on that and feel worse than I did before I got sick. But the reality is, on so many other levels, I’m in a better place than I was a year, two years, three years ago. So I choose to focus on where I’ve grown. And on the areas where I still want to get better — dealing with some of the lingering symptoms, for instance — I do what I can within my control about that. The rest, I try to let go.

So take a moment. Who are you most frequently comparing yourself to, and why? Is it a certain type of person, a certain situation? Is it related to a certain kind of life you imagined you’d have by now? When does that get triggered, and how does it relate to what you actually want and value?

If you used your own values as your measurement instead of other people’s, how would you stand up? Where have you grown in the last year, by your own standards?

For me, it’s about living with intentionality, embodying loving energy, learning and growing, trying to be healthier. By those standards, I’m doing pretty well, better than I was a year ago. When I do compare myself to other people, it’s usually about the superficial stuff — travel, mostly. But I’ve been able to travel a lot in my life, and that’s really about me prioritizing it. That’s where gratitude can come in — reminding yourself that you do have things to feel blessed for. You can shift your brain chemistry in about ten seconds just by focusing a little on gratitude.

At a minimum, start by understanding that comparison is a no-win situation. It’s designed that way. The only way to get a handle on it is to stop playing the game as much as you are now.

Try being observant this week. When you catch yourself comparing, take a pause and name it. There I am, comparing again! Ask yourself: is this telling me anything interesting about what I value, or don’t value, or how I spend my time? Use that to make choices about your next steps. The comparisons are going to keep coming. It’s wired in, and it’s all around us. But you can choose not to participate in some of these platforms as much, if at all. And when you do find yourself comparing, the real question is what you do next. Do you catch it? Can you name it? Can you learn something from it? And then can you refocus on what actually matters to you?

That’s the practice.

I'm a life and leadership coach and founder of Integrity and Joy. If this resonated, I'd love to stay connected — subscribe for more like this, or reach out anytime at integrityandjoy.com. And if you're ready for a deeper conversation, you can also book a free consultation here https://calendar.app.google/CsBx5mnpX7g9PFuP9 .