Designed to Compare

Social media awakens three things in me: comparison, unnecessary emotional triggers and every once in a while good vibes.

It’s not normal to see everybody’s vacation, everyday life or purchases.

It’s normal to see your friends and families financial choices and the way they live.

But with social media we are in this constant comparison mode with everybody you can think of.

And as humans, we are designed to compare.

Comparison is a great tool to get better, analyze our decisions, and try to imagine which decisions can take us where without actually living it.

But the amount of stuff we see and the frequency of it creates unmanageable and unactionable ways of comparison.

I’ve talked to many of my friends about this and one said they don’t really care about what others doing or they’re not even influenced by anything they see in social media.

The other said that she doesn’t wanna delete their socials cause its the new normal. Everybody uses it and it is healthier to just accept that this is the new normal and try to deal with whatever emotion it arouses in us.

I’m talking to my friends who say these things, and I’m seeing the effect socials have on them.

The friend who said the first thing is now in a financially challenging time, and I know for a fact that they’re having a hard time comparing “what can be” for themselves. They’re seeing people going on vacations, and that makes their current situation emotionally harder.

The other friend is literally in therapy cause she is unhappy due of comparison but does not delete her socials.

And there is another friend of mine, she just deleted Instagram permanently cause she was irritated by seeing every fucking person she ever knew or doesn’t even know on vacation while she is working.

For me, after trying to get rid of socials for almost six years and ending up downloading them again every time, I finally found a middle ground.

I almost always reinstalled them just to check if I had any messages.

I love the online social circle I have. I love that my friends are sending me funny or relatable reels, and we talk about stuff as if we’re bumping into each other on the street. It’s virtual small talk, and it gives me good vibes.

Naturally, I didn’t want to lose that. But I really wanted to lose the comparison and the unnecessary emotional triggers that come with scrolling videos.

I see videos about what a person should do in their twenties, what someone is using for her makeup, what your relationship should look like, what’s acceptable or unacceptable. What do we find funny now? What are the trends?

Honestly, I am tired even when I am talking about it.

Creates such an unnecessary noise in the back of my mind.

So I installed an app called Beeper. It's basically a client that connects all the messaging apps into one place, but I used it only for my socials. I connected my Instagram and Twitter to see what people were sending me and to keep up small talk with the people I love.

And I deleted Instagram and Twitter from my phone.

I can still watch videos from the websites of the socials by clicking the links people send, even if I don’t have the app.

Viewing from browsers is definitely not as comfortable and they don't have infinite scrool. Which, honestly, should be the norm.

I think in the future, when we look back at social media consumption habits, the algorithms, and the design patterns, we’ll say, “What the fuck were people doing?”

I know that most successful people—or the people whose work, attitude, and contributions to the human race I admire—don’t even use social media.

Like Cillian Murphy, Andrej Karpathy, Claudia Jessie, my boyfriend (whom I respect very much), and many more…

And for example, Christopher Nolan doesn’t even use a smartphone. (As a tech person, I think that’s a bit too much for me, but still proves my point.)

Garbage in, garbage out. No other way, unfortunately.

So I decided: the same way I watch what I eat, I’ll watch what I feed my brain. If it makes me anxious, shallow, or numb; bye bye…