First off, I hope you all had an awesome Thanksgiving. My mom came to town, and it was great to take a few days off to spend time with her, my son, and my girlfriend. And a big thank you to all of you who subscribed to this Substack to support. And if you missed it, here’s the original post.
Now, let’s get down to business. To get into the right mindset for this piece, I’m going to need you to use your imagination.
Let’s imagine that tomorrow, someone flips a switch and social media is gone. *POOF*
A Little Story
I was born in 1985, so I grew up in the 90s and graduated in 2003. My parents divorced when I was four years old, and I moved in with my dad, and I’d visit my mom on holiday breaks from school. My mom was a hardcore alcoholic, and she’d be blackout drunk daily when I came to visit. When she drank, she’d become homicidal or suicidal, and it was pretty scary seeing this as a kid who hadn’t even reached teen years. My dad was great and did the best he could, but he raised me in bars and worked a ton.
We never had much money. Until I was 10, my dad and I lived in a tiny guest house that was smaller than I can explain. Then, we moved to Las Vegas where we lived in an apartment where we struggled to get by. There were many days where I’d come home from school to an eviction notice on the door, but my dad always figured it out. He wasn’t great with money, and he was always borrowing from Peter to pay Paul. As mentioned, he raised me in bars, so he drank a ton as well, but I don’t think I’d classify him as an alcoholic. Either way, even my life with my dad was pretty chaotic, unstable, and unpredictable.
Where I lived was interesting because there was such a wide gap in wealth in the area. For example, at my high school, half the kids were similar to my economic status, but the other half were rich or at the very top of the upper-middle class.
I tell you this story because my childhood severely affected my mental health, and for the purpose of this piece, I want to focus on social comparison. Throughout my childhood (and really until I started working on myself in my late 20s), all I did was compare myself to others, and it made me more miserable.
Family
I was constantly looking at my friends’ parents and how they were still happily married. My best friend was Mormon, and his family treated me like their fifth child. They’d invite me over for Thanksgiving and Christmas for their family get-togethers, and they’d even get me presents. They were all so happy and what I perceived as normal.
My mom’s alcoholism was so bad, that when I became a teen and started becoming more independent, I went a couple years without visiting her and barely talked to her. On parent’s night during my senior year of football, while most players had both parents there, my mom cancelled her trip at the last minute, and I was shocked she even came to my graduation (but that was a hot mess, too).
Even when I wasn’t looking at the families around me, I grew up on all the 90s shows we’re all familiar with. I watched shows like Family Matters, Full House, Step by Step, and others. For me, these shows weren’t far from reality. I believed that this was the norm. In these shows, the kids or family would have an issue, and they’d talk it out, a lesson would be learned, and they were still a happy family. I wanted that.
Money
I knew some other kids who lived in an apartment, but it was rare. Most of the kids I knew lived in houses. I never lived in a house, and to this day, I still haven’t been able to buy a home. From elementary school to high school, every time I went to a friend’s house, it was nice as hell. It’d be two stories and huge. Some of my friends even had a pool, and one even had a giant trampolene. In fact, that same friend with the trampoline also had a drum set in his house, which I would have killed for because I love the drums. The house was so big that he could play and practice, and the neighbors couldn’t even hear it.
In middle school, I really started noticing the differences even more. Some of the kids had so much money that they wore the nicest clothes and had shoes more expensive than my entire wardrobe. There was even a group of the cool rich kids who had mopeds at that age while I was riding a bike like a chump. By the time I got to high school, I was still riding the bus while most of my friends had a car that their parents bought for them. And yeah, some of them had average cars, but there were kids who had SUVs and luxury cars like a Mercedes or BMW.
Most of these kids had multiple siblings as well. That meant they were doing so much better than me that their parents could afford to support multiple children and afford to buy them all sorts of stuff like nice clothes, cars, all the video games they could handle and more.
Attractiveness
I’ve been a chunky dude my whole life, and in high school, I reached my peak. I was a tri-athlete (football, wrestling, and track). I worked out daily and was one of the strongest kids for my weight class for most of high school. I watched what I ate, too and was fairly healthy with my eating habits. But despite doing everything I could to take care of my body, I was still pretty hefty. To put it in perspective, I’ve never not had man boobs.
Meanwhile, I was constantly comparing myself to the attractiveness of others. My best friend could eat literally whatever he wanted, and he was always as attractive as a Greek god. He has two sisters and a brother, and all four of them have done modeling. As I looked around, this was the norm. Everyone else I knew could manage their weight with minimal effort, and here I am, this half-Black guy with a big forehead and man boobs.
The social comparison never ended, and it made me perpetually anxious and depressed. Eventually, I turned to drugs and alcohol, and I said, “Fuck it.” As you probably know, this only made things worse.
*POOF* Social media is back
The Point
Why did I tell you this story? Because one of the main arguments about social media being toxic for kids as well as adults is how it creates this fake world where we compare ourselves to others. They argue that this is ruining the mental health of our children.
Well, social media didn’t really start exploding until years after I graduated from high school. As you just learned, I had social comparison issues for my entire life. And something I learned when I got sober is that I’m not nearly as unique as I like to think I am, so I doubt I was an isolated case.
What everyone needs to realize is that every single person I was comparing myself to was doing the exact same thing. All of my friends who were doing “better” than me were comparing themselves to others, too. And all of their “successful” parents? They were doing it as well.
Social comparison is legitimately built into how we evolved, which is why I think it is silly and completely irrational for people to study and write entire research papers and books about what social media is doing to us when it comes to this topic.
Why Did We Evolve This Way?
Evolutionary psychology is one of my favorite topics because it gets to the root of why we are the way we are. Due to natural selection, the best traits won out. So, even though some of our traits suck and make us miserable, just remember that they’re around because they somehow contributed to our survival.
I’m not going to get super detailed, but if you want some book recommendations, reach out or leave a comment.
There are many reasons we evolved to compare ourselves to others, but one of them is because it motivates us to do better. When we see someone doing better than us, we want to do better. No matter how great you are, there’s someone doing better. We care about status, so we want to get to the top. We’re regularly looking around at others to see where we’re at in the hierarchy.
Did you know that although money contributes a little to happiness, it’s not really about the money?
There was an interesting study where people were given the option to get a significant raise or receive a promotion that made them higher status. In this study, the majority of people picked status rather than money. Why? Because that’s what we care about. What we have doesn’t matter. It only matters if we have it better than someone else.
Let’s Address the Root of the Problem
I fancy myself as a realist. When I look at the problems we face with social media, I ask myself, “What’s the most realistic solution? Pressure social media platforms into not making billions of dollars? Getting Congress to get off their ass and do something? Or should we recognize the issue within ourselves and start there?”
For me, that third option wins out every single time.
My mom doesn’t read my Substack, so I’ll tell you a fun story about a conversation we had.
My mom, my girlfriend, and I went out to breakfast. She was asking about our relationship and how we’re so good together because we rarely ever fight and are really happy together. My mom’s been single for years, and she’s getting older, so she’s asking us if she should be in a relationship. When I ask why she wonders that, she says, “Well, isn’t it bad that I’m not?” I ask if she’s happy, and she says that she’s super happy. She has her dogs, her chinchilla, a lizard named Walter, and she has her kids and grandkids. So, I tell her then it doesn’t matter.
But she questions if she “should” be in a relationship because that’s the norm. We’re told this is what we “should” be doing.
Right now, my girlfriend and I are watching the new Apple show The Shrink Next Door with Paul Rudd and Will Ferrell. Without spoiling it, Paul Rudd’s character is obsessed with social comparison. His obsession with social comparison has turned him into a sociopath that does terrible things just so he doesn’t feel less than.
It took me years to overcome my issues with social comparison. I’ve done more hours than you can imagine in 12-step meetings, talking with a sponsor, and working on the 12 steps to figure this out. On top of that, I’ve done a ton of therapy. I also read an insane amount of books, spend time deeply thinking about these topics, and I write about it to help me work through it.
Now that I have a son, I’ve taught him about the dangers of social comparison since he was about five years old because I don’t want him to suffer over something so silly like I did. In a month, he’ll be thirteen, and I’m blown away at how little he cares about social comparison. He does what he wants because it makes him happy and not because he’s comparing himself to others.
At some point, I may write something more in-depth about how I’ve taught him this, but I’ll give you one important lesson I taught him that helped a ton.
When he really started getting into Fortnite, he was spending a lot of his allowance, birthday money and Christmas money on in-game cosmetics. We’ve taught him to make good decisions with his money, but I know you make better decisions when you’re educated. This is why I taught him about conspicuous consumption and to question why he wants what he wants.
We had a talk about how his urge to buy the newest skins they first came out. I explained these concepts to him and had him evaluate if he only wanted them so others perceived him in a certain way. If you get the newest skins, people might think you’re cool, but that’s not a healthy way to live. Since then, he’s been a lot smarter with his money, and his Christmas and birthday money lasts him all year because he’s better with his buying decisions all around.
So, what I’m getting at is that this is something we should all be looking at within ourselves and talking about with our kids. If social media disappeared tomorrow, our kids will find a different way to compare themselves to others. We adults do the exact same thing. Half the stuff you own is probably to impress others.
Why do you wear those clothes? Why do you drive that car? Why do you live in that house? Why do you have that furniture? How many things are you doing on a daily basis just to impress others?
In my opinion, social media is an easy scapegoat so we don’t have to do the hard work of looking inward. We love living on autopilot, and when we’re not happy, we look to as many external forces as possible to blame. Why go to therapy when you can continue buying dumb shit and getting plastic surgery?
I’ll end with this.
With as much shit as Johann Hari gets, Lost Connections is one of my favorite books that gave me so many “a-ha” moments that I almost turned into the Take On Me music video (btw that’s the funniest thing I’ll say all day, and I hope you appreciated it).
In one part of the book, he’s talking about our “junk values” and how we’re marketed to. I can’t remember if Johann wrote this or quoted someone else, but the book says something along the lines of, “The worst marketing campaign ever would be to tell you that you’re perfect just the way you are, and you don’t need anything to improve yourself.”
The reason this is so powerful is that everything is designed to tell us that we’re not good enough, but we could be better. As long as we stay in an ongoing state of not being as good as others, the rich are going to continue to make money off of us. What’s worse is the fact that the rich are in the same boat as us and continue to compare themselves to others just as much as we do.
So stop blaming social media, and get your shit together. Once we do that, we can focus on getting these platforms to curb the spread of misinformation and how polarized they’ve made us all.
I’m currently writing a book about how we’re manipulated by the news, social media, technology, advertisers, and each other. It dives into the psychological history of manipulation, our biases, tribalism, and more.
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