#53 - Why do we compare ourselves with those better off?

Plus: being wrong when it doesn't matter

Hi friends 👏

Welcome to Issue #53 of Curiosity > Certainty!

The rains are here in Mumbai. Several times over the week they made me think of the extra care our 13-year-old cocker spaniel would need. With each passing year, as our boy has grown older, the link in my head between the rains and rains-induced daily extra work has become stronger. So much so that I can’t remember, at least not without effort, what rains were like to me before Scotch. What associations over the years have fortified themselves in your head?

Reference Group Bias

Why do we always compare ourselves with those better off than us even though that makes us feel miserable about ourselves? Why don’t we compare ourselves with those worse off and feel better instead?

We suffer from something called reference group bias.

Say you’ve been a Manager for a long time. You’ve wanted a promotion for at least the last three performance appraisals. And finally the day arrives. You’ve been promoted to a Senior Manager. You feel chuffed!

But then a week passes and–bang!--you start matching yourself up with other Senior Managers, maybe the best one. How much does she make? How big is the team she manages? Gotta have what she has.

You don’t just compare yourself with one person for everything. You pick the best in everything that you see–a house like your high-flying cousin’s, a car like your neighbor’s, and the best returns in the stock market among friends.

Not just in your peer group, thanks to social media, wherever you look you have people with happier families, shinier cars, and whiter teeth. The world insists on reminding you how far you are from your desired state. Aargh! 

So you have a knack for inflicting cruelty on yourself–that much is clear. But why?

This is what Yale psychology professor and happiness researcher Laurie Santos has to say:

“We are products of natural selection, which is a blind process that, if you intentionalize it, it’s going for anything that will get you to survive and reproduce into the next generation. So natural selection is like, ‘double down on all the resources, all the accolades, all the status, all that stuff just in case’. Because we really want to make sure our genes get out there and it doesn’t care about you being happy. It really wants you to be craving, striving, always pushing for more genes in the next-generation individual. So I think we’re built with a mind that’s not necessarily geared towards making us happy.”

What can we do about it?

✅Perhaps, instead of tracking the output of those successful (money, fame, following), we could track the input (hard work, commitment, discipline). Accept that there’s someone better and use that as motivation to become better.

✅Instead of chasing shifting goalposts, we could focus on getting 1% better every day. Build a long chain of small gains. 

✅Practice negative visualization. You may have heard of it as a Stoic practice. Think of what if we lost what is ours to make us cherish what we have. 

Although that didn’t work with me growing up, when my mother used to ask me to imagine the plight of those less fortunate to make me finish what was served to me. I could only think of all my friends who were having biriyani while I was staring at a plate of greens. I was worried something was broken inside me. Thankfully, as we now know,  there was nothing wrong with me. We’re just wired to compare.

Being wrong when it rains, right when it floods

Kids design the most boring of games. 

As a kid, we used to play this game of touch cricket during school holidays. One run per touch, three misses and out. Then you had someone batting for two hours straight on a scalding summer day and the rest gritting their teeth waiting their turn.

In kiddie games all mistakes are the same. 

And because all mistakes are the same, kids don’t consider the consequences of missing the mark. They simply aim for the best outcome. Trouble is, sometimes we carry over this habit into adulthood. And that’s when it can get tricky if we don’t also consider the consequences of missing.

Say you’ve two years to devote to a career pursuit and two options at hand. Option 1: Prepare for national civil services, which is a huge deal in India and a super coveted pursuit with odds of 400:1 or so 

OR Option 2: found a startup, a journey rife with uncertainty. What would you go for? And why?

This is how I see it. Civil services put you through the wringer. Two years locked up in your room, knee deep in test preparation. 

But then founding a start-up is a form of cruel and unusual punishment too. Two years out in the world, knee deep in life preparation.

The key difference between both pursuits isn’t the difficulty. It is in the consequences of missing the mark. They are chalk and cheese.

If you make it through to one of those few coveted civil services positions, your career is set. What happens if you don’t? Does it prepare you for a job in the private sector? I don’t think so, given the non-transferrable nature of the knowledge that the exam makes you absorb. 

Failing as a founder, on the other hand, has huge signaling value for future employers or investors. Here’s someone who has had skin in the game. She can take responsibility, manage people, deal with uncertainty. In the startup option, you win even if you lose.

In fact, just by this measure, I would say a civil services aspirant has a higher risk appetite than an entrepreneur.

When it comes to big life goals, we often decide based on how likely it is that we hit the mark. We skip over what happens if we miss the mark. But it is worth asking: what happens if we fail? Does it rain or does it flood? Because we can survive rain for years and be wiped out by the first flood.

Being objective can be confusing

Expensive is sometimes a bargain. I used to be quite the shopper. Sometimes I would find the same shirt at two stores. One at say a 100 bucks discounted to 80 and the other at a flat 70, no discount. Which one do you think I would buy? The discounted shirt would feel like a steal and would make me want to talk about it with friends I was meeting later in the evening. The 70-buck shirt would feel like a budget buy, and not worth a boast. Yet, it’s the exact same shirt and I would walk out the store with a spring in my step for having paid an extra $10. Before you call me stupid, hear me out.

Just like expensive can feel like a bargain, longer can feel shorter. Waiting an entire morning in Starbucks with air conditioning and wifi feels like a breeze compared to waiting for just a minute on the road in the Mumbai heat. 

Why am I saying all this? I grew up thinking life was a math problem. I thought if I knew the rules and knew when to apply them, no problem would remain unsolved. I thought if you prepared well for your exams and did good in them, the future would sort itself out. That’s a lie. Perception matters. A thing can be objectively right and feel subjectively wrong. 

For several years in my career, I operated on the objective scale. I thought logical > psychological, reality > perception, message > messenger. 

Being objective will help you work out the area of a triangle if you know the formula and have all the values, but it’ll offer no such guarantee while navigating human relationships or selling a product. 

Not long ago, we built an AI-powered tool that made the user wait 90 interminable seconds to show an output. We freaked out over this wait when there were a ton of human-delivered services that did the same thing over 3 days and no one complained. 

If you’re 25 or 45 and haven’t realized this, take a hard look around. Perception is real. Fix it first. It is not being cynical. It is how we humans function. Being easy to work with, learning to influence without authority, and spending time understanding what is important to others are things no one will tell you about in a memo. But they are all more real than any math problem.

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