The Comparison Trap

Why looking sideways always costs you moving forward.

Keeping up with the Joneses is an expression that dates back to a 1913 comic strip. The Joneses were neighbours. Nobody ever saw them. The entire point was that the family next door was always doing slightly better, and catching up required constant effort, expense, and a complete absence of asking why you were doing it in the first place.

A hundred and ten years later, the Joneses have an Instagram account, post twice a day, and their kitchen renovation looks genuinely incredible.

The mechanism is identical. The speed is not.

What Epictetus said about other people's carts

Epictetus was a former slave who became one of the most influential philosophers of his time. He had very little. He also, by his own account, wanted very little. Not because he was resigned to poverty, but because he had thought clearly about what belonging to him actually meant.

His central teaching was the dichotomy of control: some things are up to us, and some things are not. Our opinions, our choices, our responses. Everything else, including what other people have, do, achieve, or post, falls outside. Not because it does not exist, but because expending energy on it produces nothing except the expenditure.

He wrote: concern yourself with your own progress, not with how others appear to be progressing. The word he used was appear. He was precise about that.

The Instagram problem Epictetus did not have

The Joneses in 1913 were limited by geography. You could only compare yourself to people you could actually see. This was already enough to cause significant unhappiness.

Social comparison theory, developed by psychologist Leon Festinger in 1954, showed that humans instinctively evaluate their own opinions and abilities by comparing them to others. This is not vanity. It is a navigational tool. In small communities, knowing where you stood helped you understand what was possible.

The problem is that the tool was calibrated for a village, not a feed of three hundred million people. Every upward comparison, someone more successful, more fit, more travelled, more at peace, triggers the same navigational instinct. The brain reads it as information about what you should be. It is not. It is a highlight reel from a life you do not live, filtered and timed for maximum impact.

Epictetus had one neighbour with a slightly better cart. You have three hundred million carts, updated in real time.

Why the comparison always loses

The comparison does not just make you feel worse. It actively redirects attention from what is yours to what is theirs. Every minute spent measuring your progress against someone else's visible output is a minute not spent on your own.

There is also a deeper problem. You are comparing your inside to their outside. You know your doubts, your tiredness, your unfinished projects, your quiet failures. You see only their finished product. The comparison is structurally unfair, and you are always on the wrong side of it.

Marcus Aurelius wrote: you have power over your mind, not outside events. Realise this, and you will find strength. He was not talking about social media. He was talking about the court of an emperor, surrounded by people performing success, status, and certainty at all times. The principle holds.

The question

Not: how do I compare?

But: compared to what I value, where am I actually going?

Vindica te tibi. Reclaim yourself for yourself. Not for the feed. Not for the Joneses. For you.