These days, one of the easiest ways to feel bad about your life is to spend ten minutes on Instagram.
Comparison generates so much envy and lust for what others have that it makes us unhappy with what we already possess. Whether it be a house, car, body, bank account, job, spouse, etc.
Wanting what we do not have causes great suffering. But, in my experience, it’s subtle suffering. It’s never at the forefront of my consciousness. It always shows up as low-grade dissatisfaction with my car, fitness, checking account, etc.
Conversely, comparing ourselves favorably to others also causes suffering. Spend a few hours thinking/feeling like you’re better than others and see how that feels.
For several years now I’ve been experimenting with a couple of different ways of working with this poisonous comparison.
- Gratitude Lists
- Staying Offline
Writing lists of the things I’m grateful for is a practice I learned in the rooms of recovery and it’s an incredibly effective tool.
Having to think of and write down several things that are positive forces in my life shifts my perspective from scarcity to abundance. Or from negative to positive.
If I feel like I don’t have anything I want or things aren’t going my way, making a gratitude list allows my thinking to return to a state of having so much more than I even need!
Pro Tip: Gratitude is a practice. And like most things, you have to continue to practice because our ability to feel grateful atrophies quickly when we stop taking note of the wonderful things in our lives.
Staying offline might be a little more obvious, unless you haven’t tried it. Specifically for me, I just deleted the Instagram app from my phone as that’s where most of my comparison came from.
Like I said, I could just be mindlessly flipping through posts and not even be aware that I was comparing myself to others…always ending up on the losing side.
I rarely walk away from Instagram feeling good. Even if it doesn’t hit me right away, I can feel a slow drip of “not enough” seeping into different parts of my life.
So if I need to look at IG for any reason, I can access it via web browser which is a fairly shit experience. This helps me max out at about 15 minutes per week vs the 1hr a day I used to spend.
Less comparison = less suffering.
I’d love to be spiritually evolved enough to spend time looking through posts about your new car, your Italian vacation, or your new lake house, but I can’t do it without slowly, subtly feeling like I need something more or different in my life.
Now, this isn’t for everyone. My wife’s IG feed is almost all dogs and she seems to handle it just fine.
But for me, I find that simply staying off IG just makes me a happier person. Social media (like Instagram) improves my life in almost ZERO measurable ways.
But let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater here. I do learn a lot of helpful things on YouTube. Substack doesn’t seem to have any negative effects on me. And I just recently got my very first Facebook account so I could use marketplace but I can already tell it’s not a place I’d hang out.
Also worth mentioning here is that I can occasionally get a little career dysmorphia when spending time on LinkedIn. Which is the least punk site to ever exist. It is however a necessary evil for me as many of my potential clients spend time there.
If I see someone ran a cool looking workshop in a dope location, I find myself wishing I’d gotten that gig. If I see someone working with the kind of client I think I’d be well suited for, I wish that client would call me. Or if I see someone working in some way that looks cooler/easier/more profitable than the way I’m working….well you know what I’m gonna say.
And since there are no absolutes in this world, let me say that engaging with social media isn’t ALL bad. Occasionally I can be inspired by something I see online. I can be legitimately happy to see a friend succeed. And of course, some percentage of my work and clients find me on social media.
I’m not waging a war on social media. But I am trying to spend less time wanting what you have and more time being happy with what I have.
Maybe, like my wife, you’re wired differently. Or maybe you’ve been feeling that same subtle ache after scrolling. Either way, it might be worth paying attention to.