Trying to exit the invidious world of cyber comparison

Last week I was visited at work by a reader from Malaysia who was passing through London. I am not always nice to strangers but I was curious about this one. For three years she has been emailing me about my columns – and yet she is not quite 12 years old.

When this child – who turned out to be charming and poised – had left, I started thinking about my own (much older) children. Their manners and curiosity about the world suddenly seemed wanting – as did their appetite for reading the Financial Times (written not only in their mother tongue but partly by their mother).

To prevent a pointless where-did-I-go-wrong wallow, I turned for distraction to Twitter, where someone I follow but don't much like was triumphantly tweeting the publication of a new book. I expanded the tweet and saw a dozen replies saying "Can't wait to read this" and "if it's even half as good as the last one . . . !" after which I grimly clicked through to Amazon to see the book's sale's rank. The knot in my belly loosened: it was 24,358.

I then scanned the FT website to see how well my article was doing. Its position on the “most read” list was slipping, so I checked to see how many comments it had attracted. That was better, but only slightly. Without noticing, I had escaped from invidious comparisons in the real world to the even more invidious world of cyber comparison.

To compare is human nature, but – as we all know – it always ends badly because there is always some maddening person doing considerably better than you are.

Compare and despair
Yet there is a difference between old-style comparing and cyber comparison. The first is relatively easy to recover from as it comes in infrequent hits. Exposure to a delightful girl from Malaysia doesn't happen every day and made me anxious only fleetingly: after a couple of minutes I had made a full recovery. Cyber comparisons are a nasty drip-drip of poison into the bloodstream. It goes on forever and so you never get time to recover at all.

Last month scientists confirmed what surely every parent worked out long ago: Facebook makes you unhappy. Looking at other people's apparently cool and glossy lives brings only misery. Even without a scientist to hand, I can tell you the same is true for Twitter, LinkedIn, Klout and all online rankings. Compare and despair.

It is not just teenagers and insecure journalists who torture ourselves in this way. I recently ran into one of the most worthy people I know, whose life has been dedicated to solving the nation’s most pressing problems. I found him staring at his iPhone and crowing: 106 people retweeted me! He then assured me that a similar tweet by another well-known figure had only been retweeted 12 times.

At first I thought it remarkable that this high-minded man had succumbed to such a lowdown practice. But now I’ve decided it’s not surprising at all. Most of us knowledge workers are bundles of egotism and insecurity, hungry to know how we are doing. A decade ago there were few ways of finding out; now we all carry a tool in our pockets allowing us to make constant comparisons. How can we not become addicts? Cyber comparing produces a guaranteed adrenalin rush of pleasure and pain, minute by minute.

Twitter
The act of comparing has got so big it is now threatening to swamp the act of creating. In the old days authors had to wait for the royalty statement to see how well (or badly) their books were doing. Then came Amazon offering its misery-inducing real-time sales ranking. Now Twitter offers something more scary still: we are no longer comparing things we spent years writing, but things we dashed off in seconds.

So how do we kick the habit? Experts say we must first stop monitoring how others are doing and make comparisons only with ourselves. That is easier said than done – and in any case, is not the answer. In an internet age, even self-comparisons are invidious. If the next day the important person were to find he had only 104 retweets, he would be miserable.

The experts then urge us to concentrate instead on our inner growth. But that’s no good either, as it seems even this has become a source of online comparison.

I have just emailed my 11-year-old friend and warned her I was going to put her in a column. I said I was writing about how Facebook and other social network sites make us feel bad. I’m not allowed Facebook, she replied. So there it is: a partial explanation of why she finds time for the FT, and a partial solution to the problem of cyber comparison. -(Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2013)