Avoiding Comparison Culture To Get Happier

Hi, I’m Paul Krismer, and I’m your happiness expert. This week’s video is all about social comparisons and how we are so busy, always kind of trying to measure ourselves one to another. Frankly, accomplishing those little status gains that make us feel good and, you know, we hate this stuff. We hate to believe that we participate in it. In the era of social media that we’re in today, it’s never been more prominent. Young women constantly posing to show how gorgeous they are, and men competing to show how muscly or skilled they are. It feels something yucky about it, and yet we all do it. There are real practical reasons why we do it, biological reasons why we do it, and there’s some tips I’ve got for you today to avoid the trap of being caught up in social comparisons. So, stay tuned for this enlightening video.

As a coach, public speaker, and best-selling author, I teach topics just like this one all around the world. So stay tuned, and I’ll give you practical tools that you can use to make both yourself and those around you both happier and more successful. So, why do we do all these social comparisons? Like, what drives us to post pictures of ourselves in bikinis? Well, not me in bikinis, but in social media, and in Instagram, show how strong we are. How we can climb up rocks, or highlight the great song we wrote, or the cool car we’ve got. All the kind of stuff that we do that makes us feel like we’ve got social status. You know, it is a very basic biological reason, and it’s driven by our chemicals and hormones, in particular, serotonin.

So when we were a little we kid, and any time we got praise, or accomplished something that increased our social status, we get this little blast of serotonin which is a chemical that makes us feel good. We found that these strategies that made us feel good were to look good on a relative basis to other people. So if we were told we were pretty, or we were strong, or we were brave, or we did well in the spelling bee, we got a good mark on the exam, did all kinds of little accomplishments for which we found ourselves somehow in some fashion better than some other people. It’s tragic that we feel this way, but it was nature’s way of rewarding us for increasing our status in a social hierarchy.

Now, we don’t need this for survival reason, but our genes needed for their survival. So if we want to pass on our genes to future generations, our rank in social hierarchies matter. And so, serotonin is the way of telling the person, the creature, the animal, the little um limbic system animal that we all are, that we gain importance when we have social status. And of course, from a biological perspective, this makes perfect sense. Young men who rise up in status so that they’re seen as the strongest, best protector, are going to get the best mates. Similarly, um, young females who look the most attractive and fertile and therefore have social status relative to other females in that regard, they’re going to attract those high-status mates. And so, our genes are driving this constant social comparison. And it’s just true, no matter how much we might think that we’ve evolved beyond that, and then our big prefrontal cerebral cortexes are telling us that we can dictate our lives in some other fashion. The truth is we are, we are prisoners of our emotions and these primitive drives from which they arose.

So, we’re addicted to serotonin. Just accept it, that all of us, no matter how unnon-judgmental we wish we were, we think we are, the truth is we’re not. And even, you know, the big um thing that someone told me the other day that made total sense to me, was that moral uh superiority is now one of these ways that we try to get up the hierarchy. So if somebody says, you know, I’m not into material stuff, I’m more into noble pursuits of minimalism and social justice causes and all that, well, it’s simply another way of getting social status. And there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with that, right? This isn’t a discussion of good or bad, it’s a discussion about how we can kind of get caught up in this little spiral of seeking approval, seeking status in the same methods that we have found tried and true for us. And that’s when we can get into this kind of negative spiral. Like, if if I have to constantly be putting pictures of myself up on Instagram, so that I can feel good about myself, more and more scantily clad, and selling my my image broadly in social media, you know, that could be a pretty negative thing for someone’s self-esteem ultimately.

And anytime we’re in the trap of the same technique for gaining social status, that’s where it could end up being problematic for a person. Like I say, nothing good or bad about this, it’s just natural. It’s the reflex to go to the same places over and over again. So, what I would suggest as my recommendation for you, is to look broadly in your life for the many ways that you feel good about yourselves, that you make contributions to humanity, that you are pro-social, and gaining any good feelings you have from those pro-social behaviors, rather than going back always to the same thing. So, broadly look at the things that you’re good at, that you’ve enjoyed doing, that made you feel good in the past. And if you had a list of 10 to 20, to maybe 30 things that you said, oh yeah, these things help me feel good, and yes, separately and apart, they also happen to increase my social status, which is totally fine. Look to this variety, and and play in a bunch of different sandboxes, rather than always going to the one tried and true thing because that ultimately is spiraling and negative, and reduces our self-esteem if we’re overly reliant on looking good, or being accomplished, or even just simply ranking always.

And so, as we look for many ways of increasing social status, it may be less paramount that the social status gain is what’s driving your motivation. Instead, it’s other, maybe more intrinsic motivations. Now, I want to just conclude this by saying again, which I repeat quite often in videos, it’s not about big, one-and-done, significant events. Because social status is something that we’re shooting for every single day. Ironically, this is being said by somebody who’s promoting himself on YouTube. Never mind that, you know, it’s not the one big and dramatic event that makes the difference. It’s about rewiring our brains over time and so, it’s frequency.

So all these ways of getting social status, we’re mostly reinforced and learned in our childhood and then in our teenage years when neuroplasticity was at its greatest. And so, in our teen years, for young women who were praised a lot for looking pretty, or boys praised for doing well in sports, that kind of thing, they got that neural programming deeply embedded in those years. And so it came as frequent occasions in their youth where these programs then carry on into their adulthood. Which can be pretty challenging if, when you’re 40, you’re not so great at sports or don’t have time for them anymore. You don’t have the beauty that you had when you were 21, and these can be real challenging things.

So, look to your adult mature years, where you’re self-aware and watching videos like this, and think of the frequency that you need to rewire your brain to get that serotonin blast from other sources than the ones that you’re finding more empty and less fulfilling than they used to be. I hope all that makes sense. I hope you enjoyed the video. If you like it, click the like button, share it with your friends and family, or whoever you think you might need it. The more it gets shared, the more people in the world get a little bit happier, and that is my mission. Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you next time. Bye for now.