Can philosophies and ideas help with social comparison, pressure and unhappiness?

Here I identify six philosophies or movements, explain them in brief, and then apply them to my own life experiences, showing how they can reduce feelings of comparison, social pressure, and improve everyday experience in life.

Crucially, what is discussed here are rational tools that assist everyday thinking. They will not solve our problems.

Generally, we must consult our emotions for this, which I will write about later.

The success of others and the inadequacies of oneself

Now at age 25, never have I felt the pressure of life so strongly. Other people are getting PhD’s, good jobs, etc. I too should be succeeding, contributing. When I examine the success of others, I feel unhappiness creep in and a sense of pressure that, I too, should be doing better.

I can only use my imagination to picture how it must feel as a woman. Time passes and eventually so does the probability of your ability to have children. Man, I don’t envy that. Surely this must only add to the sense of 'should' be doing better and time pressure.

It is similar for people who do not "fit in" to their society. For example, being gay in a time and place that doesn't accept gay people.

Importantly, this essay isn't written for everyone, but is more a reflection of my own place in society and how these ideas tend to help me.

I think about social pressure and comparison using a metaphor of the stone mason. When we compare ourselves to another we mentally elevate the other above ourselves - a podium with winners and losers. In doing this, we lower what we think about ourselves.

Indeed, the stone mason chips away at a piece of rock making very little indents over time. As time passes what was once a piece of stone is transformed into a statue or sculpture. Crucially, the stone mason can also destroy a statue through small chips over time.

As we compare ourselves to others, or negatively perceive social pressure, we tend to chip away at ourselves - our experiences, ideas, successes - until they are felt to be worthless, destroyed.

In my mind, we experience this roughly as unhappiness.

Given this, are there any ideas which can help us ?

1) Buddhist philosophy

asserts that the source of unhappiness is tied up in our obsession over things in the world like status or material things (1). One answer, they suggest, is essentially to let go of these things, to not give your power away to them. Hence our archetypal Buddhist is somebody who enjoys the simple life finding gratitude in the sky – rainy or blue - and takes pleasure in calming one’s mind.

In the space of gratitude, comparisons become unimportant because I'm thankful for what I do have, rather than envious for those things which I haven't.

2) The romantic tradition

finds the source of our unhappiness to arise from the competitive industrial world (2). We should go back to our natural habitat in nature, away from the noise and corruption of society. Society, they suggest, doesn’t know what is best for us. In fact, humans are born innocent and it is society that corrupts us; hence we should leave society behind.

Indeed, it is not worth comparing ourselves to others in this industrial world because such industrial goals are not worth valuing.

3) Existentialist philosophy

has looked at our human condition and asserted two things:

1) we have our death to contend with, and

2) this makes suffering inevitable, setting the limitations upon our life, thereby creating a boundary for us to live within (3).

Each of us has a nature – something that makes us different to someone else – and it’s up to us to live authentically. That is, by listening to ourselves and making decisions based on our values, interests, and motivations.

Because we have our mortality to contend with, this should encourage us to make the most of our time in a way that is authentic to us. The world will be a better place if people find out who they are and contribute to the world in their own unique, authentic, way.

Our fundamental differences - our uniqueness - makes social comparison and feelings of pressure superfluous, not meaningful.

4) The Lie-flat movement

is the idea emerging currently from young people in China (4). Looking around at Chinese society, young people see, hear and feel a hyper-competitive environment in which people are living to work, rather than working to live. A model citizen is encouraged to go out and work long-hours, have a family, and conform to traditional social norms.

But people may not want to work long-hours, have a family, or conform to traditional social norms. A poem that went viral on Chinese social media platform WeChat reads,

“Lying flat, is to not bow down. Lying flat, is to not kneel. Lying flat, is to stand up horizontally. Lying flat, is a straight spine.”

To lie flat, then, is to look around at what society wants me to do and to do something different. By focusing on our own personal goals we free ourselves from the trap of comparison and social pressure.

5) The Slow Media movement

comes from modern day Germany (5). They suggest that with social media age came many things, certainly the ability to check in our succeeding friends has never been easier. Indeed, says my friend Carl, what is the internet if nothing but a reflection of our common human nature, of our very consciousness itself?

We have something powerful on our hands here and because of this, we should slow down. Life existed before the internet, so we should not forget that we can too.

By reducing our time spend looking at the best side of everyone's life, we mathematically reduce the number of comparisons we make to others, and ease our tendency to feel pressured by the putative successes of other people.

6) Behavioural Economics

is an academic school of thought that emerged from a discussion between psychology and economics (6). Relevant here are two key assertions:

1) people do not always think rationally, but tend to be cognitively lazy relying on mental shortcuts to make decisions on very minor details, which often creates errors or biases.

2) people have brains built to comprehend and survive in a natural world; we rely on rapid access to negative information. For this reason we are prone to overestimating the negative information in the world.

Therefore, we're wired to jump to conclusions about others, often based on small amounts of information, making it likely our conclusions about their success or happiness will be wrong. Furthermore, because social pressure is negative information, we're prone to over estimate the importance of this pressure.

Common themes

1) there is a pessimism built into life, but that we – as participants in life – can do something about this.

2) it is naïve to assume that other people – society – always knows what is best for us

3) the individual person has potential within themselves to create a better life. That this process begins internally with the machinery of mental thought; when we do this, we may begin to find answers.

Scepticism toward society?

It seems that these ideas encourage us to be critical of what society wants for us, and what we want for ourselves. But how sceptical of society ought we to be?

It is probably naïve to create a dichotomy between the individual and society. The individual lives in, relies on, and is a beneficiary of society.

On the big scale, one central idea in the history of why some human societies developed more than others is that isolation is terrible for development. Isolated societies are vulnerable to external foreign disease or attack, as well as internal cultural and technological stagnation (7).

Europe and Asia are connected across vast stretches of land which share similar climatic conditions. This allowed diseases, animals, plants, crops, ideas, and people to move about across this land and take advantage of the similar climates.

When one society developed an idea or technology, it was relatively easy to spread this from A to B.

Societies in Australia, the Americas and Africa do not benefit from the same geography as the Eurasian land mass. They all have longer Y axes, whereas Eurasia has a longer X axis.

This means that Australia, the Americas, and Africa are longer vertically than horizontally. When moving vertically - up and down - the geography changes much more drastically than when you move horizontally - left and right.

It means that other societies were inaccessible because of mountain passes. Or it meant that other societies relied on totally different crops, because of a totally different climate. Probably, disease, crops, ideas, all struggled to travel and take hold in Australia, the Americas, and Africa, as compared to Eurasia, because of these geographical differences.

Competition and cooperation between societies drives progress towards a better life, and Eurasia's access to these things across history probably allowed it to develop in ways that other peoples in other continents were unable to. There's inherently good or special about being from Europe or Asia, it's just that those people had better access to other people, and other resources.

We need others to develop!

And if societies develop both culturally and technologically through communication, then it follows that the individuals within those societies ought to abide by similar principles.

Specifically, as the poet John Donne is quoted as saying:

“No one man is an island” (1).

In the quest for purpose, entrepreneurship or happiness in life, there is no need to reinvent the wheel.  In short, we need other people to give us purpose, ideas, happiness.

And yet each of our philosophies encourages scepticism towards society - to other people - which I think is a good idea. But we should bear in mind that all of us today are children of cooperation and competition, that comes only from talking, listening to, and learning about the world from other people.

It would be a mistake to turn our back on society, as if the problem only lay there (although sometimes the problems are in fact societal).

Bearing this in mind, I'll now discuss how I think these ideas apply to my life, helping to reduce the unhappiness that comes with social comparison and pressure.

Applying the ideas to everyday life

A brief note. The 20th century has taught us, perhaps, that:

“Ideology is dead (8)”

We have seen what happens when people become obsessed with an idea such Nazism or Communism as if that alone would solve our problems. And with this in mind we won’t take any one idea too seriously.

The pragmatic approach, instead, is to extract truth from whatever works, with the benefit that we can generally learn something from everyone (9).

Buddhism

What I take from the Buddhist philosophy is the idea that I can be happy with less, much less. So, when I look to others getting houses, good jobs, and living ‘the good life’, I can take comfort in the fact that these are things not essential to be happy or fulfilled.

To date, my favourite jobs have been those where I worked with other people that I enjoyed the company of or where we worked towards a common shared goal. Working for the Youth Hostel Association, for example, I cleaned bedrooms, toilets, and mopped floors. But working with great people who shared a common outlook towards an appreciation of the outdoors and travel made the experience meaningful to me. Indeed. we worked for minimum wage and lived cheaply.

Romanticism

Of all ideas, I am most sceptical about romanticism. I think they’re wrong that society corrupts us, because by nature we’re animals and society civilizes us through concepts like table manners, human rights, and gender equality (2). For anyone who is sceptical of society in a deep way, I suggest you take a look at the list of human universals that anthropologists suspect emerge in primitive societies before modern civilisation because it suggests how the lifestyle of our fellow hunter-gatherers is, both alive and dead (10).

Indeed, there are many gifts that come with living in a civilisation and people really do tend to overemphasise just how good the past was, forgetting the bad. This is a psychological cause of how memory works: over time we compress our memories  so that our past day to day experiences are forgotten, and then we extract out what is meaningful to us.

Imagine, for example, a past romantic relationship of yours. If you're like me and feeling nostalgic, you'll remember what was good and meaningful, tending to forget the little things that annoyed you, and why it was never going to work out.

Hence the genius in Freud's quote:

“One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.” (3)

That said, as humans we’ve certainly spent the majority of our time in nature. I think getting into and appreciating nature is a beautiful thing and is something worth striving for.

Our cramped cities are exciting and wonderful, but for me there is nothing that helps to relieve social pressure than being among the birds, trees and sounds of nature outdoors. If evolution teaches us anything it’s that we are evolved animals who come from nature – indeed, we are nature itself.

Biological science tends to progress rapidly because we know that we are animals. We share cellular dynamics with yeast and bacteria, nervous systems with insects and worms, and brain structures with all vertebrates (11). For these reasons a human recently took on a genetically modified heart from a pig, and getting into the great outdoors really is pretty great.

Again, I have spent the best of a year working in national parks and living within close proximity to beautiful nature. These really were wonderful times, and I love visiting beautiful outdoor places. I find it to almost act as a reset, to witness a beautiful view, mountain, or lake.

The scholar of religion Mircea Eliade has argued that one does need to be religious or believe in God to have religious experiences (1). Indeed, being in nature is awe-inspiring and his proposition certainly rings true on my Darwinian-materialist ears.

Darwin himself has written:

“Among the scenes which are deeply impressed on my mind, none exceed in sublimity the primeval forests undefaced by the hand of man; whether those of Brazil, where the powers of Life are predominant, or those of Tierra del Fuego, where Death and decay prevail. Both are temples filled with the varied productions of the God of Nature: -- no one can stand in these solitudes unmoved, and not feel that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body.” (16)

Existentialism

There can be no denial there one day we shall cease to exist, and that we all are unique – genetically, psychologically, phenomenologically (12). I am very sympathetic to the idea that we should try to live authentically. That is, by the values that drive us as opposed to others.

To live authentically also means to live with the full range of human emotions. Anxiety, for example, is a normal response to a new environment. To live without anxiety, for the existentialist, is to hide from life (3).

Anxiety becomes maladaptive only when it prevents people from systematically approaching life, as happened to me in my teenage years. Under these conditions, therapy can be helpful. Nevertheless, anxiety is an emotion there to inform us that something is important to us or that scares us.

For the existentialist, it is these experiences that characterise the authentic life. That is, the ability go out there and do new stuff that you find uncomfortable.

Some of my best life experiences to date are those which have induced incredible amounts of anxiety in me: going to therapy and taking on the exposure challenges that cognitive behavioural therapy entails, seeking out and finding bartender work in Berlin, and sharing intimate feelings with partners.

Anxiety unmanaged will dominate and control your life; getting a handle on my own anxiety, taming and respecting it has been a central driver in how I try to live authentically. Reducing my anxiety has freed me up to pursue things I'd like to meaning that I worry less about what others think of me, my tendency to make unfair comparisons and easing the feeling of social pressure that comes with living in a society.

Indeed, this was not one event or achieved by myself alone, or without large amounts of luck. Without my supportive and empathic parents I don't think the therapy would have gone so well for me.

There's also the skill of the therapist herself. It's estimated, for example, that 50% of people who engage in CBT don't really get much out of it (17). To be somebody who gained a huge amount from it, I feel existentially lucky, and grateful

Living to please others like our parents, schoolmates, or bosses is not a good strategy. I remember meeting a student of astrophysics, who, when he graduated, was looking forward to becoming a bartender because that looked like a job where people had a lot of fun. Although he didn't specify it exactly, it seemed like he was studying his current course to please others - perhaps his parents.

To me, this guy seemed to have freed himself from the complex of ideas that others had imposed on him, and was ready to go out into the world and pursue his own ideas, rather than living up to the pressure of what he "should" be doing.

I think it's wonderful to look and listen to others, learning where we can through healthy competition and co-operation. Others do wonderful things and we should learn from them. But I think making important life decisions based on comparisons to others and a pressure to conform to a standard of "I should be doing this" is a route to unhappiness.

Freud emphasised that a man couldn't be a man until his father had died. And Jung said, yeah - but the death can be symbolic (18). Though they speak about men and fathers, I think that what they are both getting at is the bigger idea that we shouldn't live our lives by the values that top-down authority places upon us, but instead seek out what is important, meaningful, or worthwhile to us.

My experience has been that of looking up to authority figures in my life such as my own father. But recently I've experienced Jung's symbolic death, and recognise how my own values, goals, and interests differ from his, and that I want to pursue these myself. At first it's a terrible, scary and isolating feeling. But what emerges is something liberating, like the rebirth of a phoenix: the old dies in order for make room for new life.

Indeed, writing in Faust , Goethe writes:

"How can you grieve at that!

Isn’t it enough for an honest man

To exercise the skill he has,

Carefully, precisely, as given?

Honour your father as a youth,

And receive his teaching in your soul,

As a man, then, add to scientific truth,

So your son can achieve a higher goal." (19)

This is a good idea.

1) Incorporate the knowledge from your society, your family, your father (and mother too for that matter) and let it built you up.

2) Then, one day - you go your own way, creating your own path, knowledge, experiences, and set the stage for future generations.

The idea that we can just pursue our own values and ideas is refuted by characters from history like Mao Zedong, Hitler, Stalin, and many, many others. In other words, we need a social conscience - to think about society.

And so we have the important interplay between society and the individual that to me characterises the mindful existentialist.

We learn what we can from who we can, take what is useful, and apply it to our lives. But then something happens: we go our own way, creating lives based on our inner DNA ridden authentic nature, allowing our genetic trajectories of interest, values, and experience to manifest in the world. Here lies my sympathies with existentialism.

Lie-flat movement – young people see the world differently.

The brains of young people are not fully developed, and they are generally responsible for evaluating and progressing new ideas in the world (12). For example, Darwin concluded in the Origin of Species with the prediction that it would be the responsibility of the younger generation to evaluate the evidence and decide how biology should progress (13).

Similarly, the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, in a survey of the history of science, asserted that it is often young people who make discoveries or challenge old ideas (14).

We grow into maturity with mental algorithms - habitual ways of thinking - that close our mind to new ideas or ways of being in the world. Out of modern China it is the young who look to their society and say we want something different. Just because society wants us to work tirelessly doesn’t mean we want to.

We want to enjoy our time and not allow work to rule our lives. Young people in China and around the world are constantly reminded of the success stories, the hard work of others, and encouraged to live up to unrealistic expectations from others.

I have personally been living so far, age age to 25, with the following philosophy I found in a YouTube video, which (probably) got it from somewhere else.

The idea above is that at each stage of our lives we never have all three of Time, Money and Energy.

When we're young we have lots of time and energy, but not much money.

In middle age, lots of money and energy, but no time.

When we're old, we have the time and the money, but no energy.

This idea helped me frame what was important to me to do while I was still young (I still consider myself at 25 to be young!). More than anything I wanted to travel and work abroad, and this frame helped me to pursue these things while most other people around were not.

Young people really do see the world differently, and it is a time in life not to conform to what people want from us, but to think about how we can make the most of our time and energy.

Again, seeking out what we're interested in is a great antidote to avoiding the pitfalls of comparison and pressure.

Slow Media movement

The internet reflects human nature and consciousness. Hence when Buddha was banging on about “letting go” 2,500 years ago, he only had to contend with the judgement of his physical neighbours. Now, with social media, we contend with the judgement not only of our whole school, but potentially with billions of other people on these networks.

We all tend to present ourselves in the best light and social media extends our ability to do this beyond those in our physical presence, to the digital world at large. We lived before these technologies, they are new, fast moving, and we would be well advised to slow down with our use.

We can use technology less, adopt a minimalist philosophy, or perhaps observe ourselves using it and see how we feel (15). Seeing the success of others with new children, marriages, jobs may at first bring us joy – but over time it may simultaneously oppress us.

Over time I noticed that while I did enjoy using Instagram and posting cool things, I also tended to feel negative too. Exposing ourselves to the best sides of other people continuously can add to a sense of unfair comparison that we aren't good enough, beautiful enough, or that our experiences are wrong, worthless.

I believe we can reduce the amount we compare ourselves to others by challenging our own internal thought processes, but also that we compare ourselves to others automatically. Hence, even the best trained mind who "does not compare herself to others" would have a hard time on a platform like Instagram.

I think it really is worth noticing how we feel when using social media platforms, and running experiments with ourselves where we might try to use them less, turn off our notifications for a while, or to simply take a break.

The power of online communication, however, really is fantastic. Because I have travelled abroad to different countries and had conversations with other young people in hostels, I've added them on social media, stayed in touch, and have visited them later on - or they've come to visit me.

Harnessing social media for positive ends is worth striving for, just as reducing its harm is too.

Behavioural economists

Perhaps we aren’t good judges of ourselves and others. We rely on mental shortcuts, often biased by emotion.

We’re machines of nature built to jump to conclusions. We look at others and see success, making all sorts of wild assumptions about how happy they are, how they got there, and how we now feel – less than and crap.

One lesson we might learn is that we’re decision makers with all sorts of limitations placed on us, so our conclusions should be scrutinised.

Do I really want what the other person has? Would I be happy if I had what they did?

By taking stock of our mental patterns and comparisons we can begin to see what is important to us and what isn’t. We should also pay attention to how we feel. For example, if we’re tired or in a bad mood, we’re likely to arrive at poor decisions, or make unfair comparisons of ourselves towards others.

If we recognise this state of mind, perhaps we can go easier on ourselves or withhold a decision until we feel in a better frame of mind.

Conclusion

I feel myself looking around at others in my life and getting sucked into comparative patterns of thought. Others are doing better than me, having better research projects, jobs or purposes in the world. On reflection, such conclusions are unfair.

The success of others is not my enemy. Because, as a member of society I generally benefit and learn from the success of others. Perhaps living in a society, however, comes with an oppressive cost: the success of others will make me aware of my own inadequacies, especially on days where I’m not feeling the best psychologically.

Others may be succeeding and that’s great, but I can still be happier with less. I can get out into nature to rejuvenate myself or reflect on what is important to me. This process will help orient myself towards actions in the world that make sense for and are good for me.

I can learn from the young in China, that life need not be about relentless work – that this a trap. Turning towards the internet I will find success everywhere I look, often making me feel worse about myself. But merely recognising this – and the fact that I can slow down in my technology use – will be helpful. Internet or no internet, we all share stories with others that highlight the good side, often overexaggerating how good things are.

Perhaps how I was feeling that day biased me towards an unfair judgement, something I am wired to do on the best of days.

In conclusion, then, these ideas help me see that living in the company of others – in society – brings many pitfalls to happiness. But also, with the help of ideas, through examining my mental thought patterns, moods and behaviours, I can learn to live with such costs or even navigate these pitfalls of happiness with a better sense of my own direction and purpose in everyday life.

References

1) Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis (2006)

2) Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of our Nature (2012)

3) B. R. Hergenhahn, The History of Psychology (1986)

4) Chinese Millennials Are Giving Up the Rat Race to ‘Lie Flat’, https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-lying-flat-took-chinas-overworked-millennials-by-storm (2021)

5) Slow Media Movement, http://en.slow-media.net/manifesto (2010)

6) Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow (2011)

7) Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel (1997)

8) Jordan Peterson, Beyond Order (2021)

9) Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy (1961)

10) List of Human Universals https://condor.depaul.edu/mfiddler/hyphen/humunivers.htm (1991)

11) Gary Marcus, The Birth of the Mind (2004)

12) David Eagleman, The Brain (2015)

13) Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859)

14) Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)

15) Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism (2019)

16) Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle (1839)

17) Tom J. Johnsen and Oddgeir Friborg, The Effects of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy as an Anti-Depressive Treatment is Falling: A Meta-Analysis (2015)

18) 2017 Personality 09: Freud and the Dynamic Unconscious https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFWLwYyrMRE&ab_channel=JordanBPeterson (2017)

19) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust (1808)