BAGDIGESTS

It usually doesn't feel like comparison while it's happening. You're just scrolling, catching up on people's lives, maybe killing a few minutes in a waiting room. But somewhere in that scroll, a quiet measuring stick gets picked up, their house against yours, their relationship against yours, their progress against your timeline, and you put the phone down feeling slightly worse than when you picked it up, without quite knowing why. Comparison Was Always Part of Being Human This isn't a new flaw that social media invented. Psychologists have long described "social comparison" as a basic way people evaluate themselves, by checking their standing against others rather than against some fixed, objective measure. In small, local communities, this comparison was naturally limited, you compared yourself to neighbors, coworkers, and family, people whose full circumstances you actually understood. What's changed isn't the instinct itself, it's the...