Before you start

This is a short book and you can read it in two or three sittings. It's about one habit. You see a piece of someone else's life, you hold your own life up against it, and yours comes off worse. It happens after a dinner at a friend's house, in the school car park, at a wedding, and twenty times an evening on a phone. Each time it takes a second or two, and it leaves you feeling a bit smaller than you were.

I'm going to argue three things. The first is that comparing yourself with other people is normal, quick and sometimes useful, and I won't ask you to stop. You couldn't if you tried. The second is that the particular comparison you keep making is fixed before it starts. You're holding everything you know about your own life against a selection from somebody else's. You're choosing the most impressive person you know in each department. And you're playing for a ranking that has no top. Second place is built into the method. It tells you almost nothing about how your life is going. The third is practical. There's a question worth asking in the moment after the comparison lands, and there's a better thing to measure your life against. Chapters 12 and 13 cover both.

A few things this book isn't. It isn't an attack on social media, which gets one chapter and turns out to be less of the story than you'd expect. It doesn't claim that everyone you envy is secretly miserable. Some of them are doing very well, and chapter 9 deals with that honestly. And it won't tell you to count your blessings. That advice has never worked on anyone who was driving home from a housewarming.

Three cautions.

If you've felt low or hopeless most of the time for weeks, and everything you see seems to prove you've failed, that may be depression and not a comparing habit. Low self-esteem and feeling hopeless are among the symptoms the NHS lists. A GP should hear about it. Chapter 14 says more.

If most of your comparing is about your face, your body or your weight, and it's taking up a lot of your day, that also deserves more than a book. Chapter 14 gives the signs the NHS lists and where to go.

And if your life is hard in ways that are plain fact, such as money that doesn't cover the month, poor health or having nobody to talk to, I'm not going to tell you it's all in how you look at it. This book is about the extra weight that comparing adds. It can't take away the weight that's really there.

The notes at the back give the studies I've relied on and their limits. Where I'm giving my own reasoning and not a finding, I'll say so.