Comparison creates standards rather than finding them. Every ranking system, whether it is the popularity of the iPhone or the fitness ideals shown on screens, is based on a made-up baseline that society accepts as real. This process shapes most digital habits. Social platforms turn everyday attention into constant comparisons. These standards do not have a clear origin. They show up, get accepted, and start dividing people into winners and losers, even though everything began as a single continuous reality. Before comparison, things like light and dark or hot and cold were just different parts of the same thing. Language separated them, and comparison put them in order.

Light and Dark Are One Phenomenon Split by Language

Quick Summary: Photons take up space. When they are not there, the space is still there, just empty. Language struggles to capture a single, ongoing fact, so it creates two words when physics needs only one. Ian Hacking’s research on classification shows that naming something changes what we see. There is always a spectrum behind every simple either-or that people create.

Light and dark begin as a single phenomenon. The photons that make up the light exist. The absence of these same photons also exists. The only difference between light and dark is whether photons are present.

The hard part of language is that we need two things to compare. We can’t say “this is light” and “this is not light,” so the word “dark” was coined. Our language changed the essence of one thing into two.

Ian Hacking described this as the looping effect. When we name a category, the thing we name often starts to act in line with that category (Source: Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What?). Light existed before we had a word for it. Once we named it, light became something that seemed to need an opposite.

Hot and cold work in the same way. The essence of temperature is how fast molecular motion runs. It can either run fast in the hot case or run slow in the cold case. (I’m doing the same thing with fast and slow. I should say one is fast and the other is not fast, or not as fast).

A thermometer reads a number, and that number puts us in the binary of hot or cold. We do this because we don’t want to deal with the spectrum of temperatures in between hot and cold. Our limited brains need definitive sides. When it comes to sides, it’s our responsibility to pick one.

This is the machinery running against everything we’ve measured in life. There’s a standard by which we judge something. It’s an assumption that we’ve made official. Anything that doesn’t meet that standard is the opposite.

The Opposite is That Which is Not the Standard

In the Abrahamic religions, God is the standard, and because no one could ever reach the standard of God, we must all be sinners. No one knows where these standards come from. Yet the standard was built the same way we created darkness in the absence of light. It’s one fact split into two and treated as though they come in pairs.

From this point of view, the idea of improvement and optimization never sat right with me. When someone says they are improving, they’ve arbitrarily set themselves on a standard and are now working to close the gap.

I lived in a job description that preaches getting better, but getting better means there’s a target to aim for. There is an example of better. Our getting better was finding benchmarks from some blog and then judging ourselves against it.

Some publication took a poll of how 30 organizations are doing their work, and the idea is that everyone should be meeting the same averages. If you are meeting the averages, you are succeeding. If you aren’t, you are failing.

The Standard Behind a Million Toothpaste Options

Quick Summary: When a market is full of similar products, people look for a quick way to decide. Brands create that shortcut. Byron Sharp’s research shows that most people buy based on what is available and familiar, not because they think one product is better (Source: Byron Sharp, How Brands Grow). The iPhone, for example, stands for the ‘right’ choice, while other options are seen as lacking.

Most of what we call meaning is derived from contrast. We see things by their differences, even if they are somewhat similar. Capitalism has done a great job of this by providing consumers with variations of essentially the same products.

A million toothpaste options exist, but they all do the same thing. To choose the “best” option for us, we spend a lot of our energy comparing. Yet the idea of the best is subjective. First, we must establish a standard for the best, then compare others to it.

Maybe it’s better to use smartphones as an example. The best-selling smartphone is most likely the iPhone. By this measure, most people will say that the iPhone is the best phone. As a result, any phone that isn’t an iPhone is seen as inferior.

People cringe when they open their message app and see a green bubble because Android phones are seen as competitors to the iPhone. Even when both phones essentially do the same thing.

The Standards That Weren’t Chosen

Quick Summary: Grading systems set a fixed goal before any student even takes an exam. People are measured against standards they never agreed to. Erving Goffman’s ideas about self-presentation describe this kind of pressure directly (Source: Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life). No one chose these targets; we all just ended up with them.

We do this in other aspects of life. Students compete with one another, comparing their test grades knowing that an A is the standard. Teenagers compare their bodies to what they see on social media, knowing that a fit/lean body is the standard. Some of us even compare our everyday lives to someone else’s vacation. Each waking day, we wonder how we measure up to others.

Leon Festinger introduced this idea in 1954. His theory says that people compare themselves to others mostly when there is no clear way to measure themselves (Source: EBSCO). For example, grades provide a standard, but bodies do not. This lack of a real measure is why the body often becomes a source of struggle.

The Instinct to Compare

Quick Summary: Festinger identifies the process that drives people to constantly measure themselves. This process is strongest when there is no clear standard to compare against. It is the lack of a clear measure that causes anxiety, rather than the act of comparing itself.

Leon Festinger introduced social comparison theory in 1954. People often judge their own opinions and abilities by comparing themselves to others, especially when there is no clear standard (Source: EBSCO).

For example, a runner knows her mile time because a number tells her. She does not need to compare herself to another runner to know if six minutes is fast.

There is no number for beauty, career success, parenting, or happiness. Without a clear way to measure these things, people compare themselves even more. When someone faces a question that cannot be measured, they often look to the nearest person and use them as a standard.

Social media has made this kind of comparison much easier. Every day, a feed shows thousands of people, each one a possible standard. Festinger’s original theory focused on comparing with a neighbor or coworker.

Now, people compare themselves to strangers, often judging just a small, carefully chosen part of someone’s life, seen for a few seconds and then forgotten until the next scroll.

How to Catch a Comparison Before It Becomes a Judgment

Why Progress Is a Story

Quick Summary: A ranking requires two positions, high and low, with a person assigned to each. Admiration collapses into self-negation the moment it becomes measurement. Judgment follows quickly, and judgment strips context from the person being judged. Dehumanization is the mechanism’s final output, not an accident of it.

All comparison turns life into a competition. Even something as arbitrary as light and dark turns into a competition where light should be celebrated and darkness eliminated. Light is seen as good and darkness seen as evil.

We find ourselves in arbitrary rankings, wondering who looks better, is further ahead in their career, or is more successful. Some might call this admiration, but even then, we are uplifting someone or something by negating ourselves.

Instead of saying, “Wow, she’s beautiful,” we say, “I wish I had the same cheekbones as her.” We might find someone’s success inspirational, but we can also see ourselves as failures by comparison.

Inherently, we like to believe there is a measuring stick by which every person is held, but it is just a figment of our imagination. We like to think of success as a staircase everyone is climbing, or a race everyone is competing in. Little do we know that the idea of progress is an illusion.

When we compare people, places, and things, we start to judge. When we say this is better than that, our logical brains must come up with reasoning behind our opinions.

We tend to uplift one thing and disparage the other. In comparison, one worker is a star, while another falls short of expectations. Another common example is finding reasons not to date a person. He’s not tall enough or doesn’t make enough money. She’s either too clingy or a solid 7.

This type of judgment prevents us from seeing these people as they are. We see them only as we want to, which is unfair to the person in front of us. The harsher the judgment, the more they begin to dehumanize.

The Ideal Person Does Not Exist

Quick Summary: An ideal implies a template no living person has met. Pop culture manufactures the template and then withholds its source. Michel Foucault’s account of normalization explains how invisible standards discipline behavior without ever being stated outright (Source: Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish). Age, marital status, and income timelines get treated as scorecards. No scorecard was ever issued.

There’s no such thing as an objective standard that every person should reach. These standards are the opinions we hold about an ideal person or situation that may never exist.

There’s no such thing as an ideal level of success, body type, or life timeline. I’m not a failure because I’m in my 30s and have never been married. Any of these standards is imaginary, maintained by our pop culture and projections.

Michel Foucault described this as normalization. Once a standard becomes part of people’s thinking, it no longer needs anyone to enforce it (Source: Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish). No one sets rules for when to get married. Instead, someone in their thirties often feels that pressure themselves.

The Internal Performance Review

Quick Summary: Self-comparison turns the role of judging from others to ourselves, and this inner critic never takes a break. Social media encourages this ongoing self-check by presenting it as a positive thing, telling people to compete with their past selves. Arlie Hochschild’s idea of emotional labor applies here because handling this inner critic requires real effort (Source: Arlie Hochschild, The Managed Heart). People often feel unhappy when their inner judge decides they have not measured up.

This self-comparison turns life into an ongoing performance review, and I don’t like performance reviews. Yet again, this self-comparison is celebrated.

Many social media posts say that my only competition is myself. Constantly asking myself whether I am where I want to be, whether I’m better now than I was last year, or whether I’m improving fast enough doesn’t improve my life.

If the answer to these questions is no, it’ll bring on suffering. I’d only be disappointed in myself; the only remedy would be to try harder. The constant comparison is only a distraction from discovering who we are.

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