I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.

Two people can have almost identical lives — same income, same career stage, same general circumstances — and one feels grateful while the other feels like a failure.

The difference isn’t in the life. It’s in the measurement.

Two ways to measure yourself

Psychology has studied this for decades, and the research draws a sharp line between two types of self-evaluation.

The first is social comparison — measuring yourself against other people. Leon Festinger introduced this concept in his foundational 1954 paper published in Human Relations, proposing that humans have a fundamental drive to evaluate themselves by comparing to others. When objective standards aren’t available (and they almost never are for things like “success” or “happiness”), we look sideways.

The second is temporal comparison — measuring yourself against your own past. Psychologist Stuart Albert formalized this in 1977, proposing that people also evaluate themselves by comparing where they are now to where they were before.

Research by Anne Wilson and Michael Ross, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, found something striking across five studies: when people are motivated to feel good about themselves, they naturally favor temporal-past comparisons — looking at how far they’ve come. These comparisons tend to be gratifying because they usually reveal improvement over time.

But when people are motivated to evaluate themselves accurately — to figure out exactly where they stand — they default to social comparison. They look sideways instead of backward.

Here’s the problem. Social media has made looking sideways the default setting of an entire generation. And it’s making people miserable.

The highlight reel problem

Before social media, your social comparisons were limited and grounded. You compared yourself to a handful of people you actually knew. And because you knew them personally, you had context. You knew about their struggles, their failures, their bad days.

Now? You compare yourself to hundreds of people you barely know, seeing only their best moments — the engagement, the promotion, the holiday, the renovation — with zero context about the ordinary, difficult, or painful parts of their lives.

A study published in PLOS ONE examining social comparisons on social media found that these platforms overwhelmingly trigger upward comparisons — the kind where you perceive others as doing better than you. The researchers found this was directly linked to lower self-esteem and increased depressive symptoms.

And a meta-analysis of 78 studies confirmed that social comparison on social media had one of the strongest negative relationships with wellbeing of any variable studied — a correlation of -0.30 with hedonic wellbeing across thousands of participants.

That’s the scoreboard most people are using in their 30s and 40s. And it’s rigged.

What temporal comparison actually feels like

Now think about the person at 37 who feels successful.

They’re not looking sideways. They’re looking backward.

They’re comparing themselves to who they were at 27. At 22. At 18. And when they do that, the picture almost always looks good. Because most people, by their late thirties, have learned things, built things, survived things, and grown in ways their younger self couldn’t have imagined.

Research by Zell and Alicke directly tested what happens when people have both temporal and social comparison information available. They found that both independently influenced self-evaluations. But here’s the key finding: actors — the people actually living the experience — paid significant attention to temporal comparison information. External observers, watching the same person, ignored it completely and evaluated based solely on social standing.

In other words, when you’re inside your own life, your personal growth matters to you. But the world around you — including social media — only cares about where you rank.

The person who feels successful at 37 has figured out how to stay inside their own story. The person who feels behind has been pulled into everyone else’s.

Why survivorship bias makes this worse

There’s another layer that nobody talks about enough.

The milestones you see on social media aren’t a random sample of human experience. They’re a survivorship-biased sample. You see the successes because successes get posted. You don’t see the business that failed, the relationship that ended, the promotion that didn’t come, the year that felt like treading water.

This means you’re comparing your full, unfiltered life — including every setback, every boring Tuesday, every moment of self-doubt — against a curated collection of other people’s peak moments.

That’s not comparison. That’s self-sabotage with an algorithm.

The 37-year-old paradox

The late thirties are particularly brutal for this because they’re the years when the traditional markers of adult success pile up. Marriage. Kids. House. Career advancement. Financial security.

These are exactly the things social media is designed to showcase. And because your network now contains hundreds of people all hitting these milestones at slightly different times, your feed becomes a never-ending conveyor belt of other people’s victories.

It doesn’t matter that you’ve grown enormously in the last decade. It doesn’t matter that you’re healthier, wiser, more capable, and more self-aware than you were at 25. None of that shows up in the comparison because temporal growth doesn’t have a post format.

Nobody announces: “Just realized I handle conflict better than I did five years ago.” Nobody shares: “I’m less anxious than I used to be and I think that’s worth celebrating.” Nobody posts: “I looked back at my life ten years ago and I’m genuinely proud of how far I’ve come.”

Those are temporal comparisons. They’re the ones that actually make you feel good. And they’re invisible on every platform.

How to switch the scoreboard

I’m not going to tell you to delete social media. That advice is everywhere and most people aren’t going to do it.

What I will say is this: the next time you feel behind, ask yourself one question.

Behind compared to what?

If the answer is “compared to what I see online,” you’re using a broken measurement tool. You’re comparing your full life to other people’s curated fragments. You’re evaluating your trajectory using someone else’s snapshot.

If instead you ask “compared to where I was five years ago” — the picture almost always changes.

Because the truth is, most of us at 37 are doing better than we were at 32. And we were doing better at 32 than we were at 27. The trajectory is usually upward, even when it doesn’t feel that way. Especially when it doesn’t feel that way.

The measurement is the message

I turned 37 last year. And I’ll be honest — I’ve felt both versions of this.

I’ve had mornings where I opened my phone and felt like I was falling behind everyone I knew. And I’ve had mornings where I looked at the life I’ve actually built — the business, the family, the fact that I’m living in Saigon doing work I care about — and felt genuinely grateful.

Same life. Same person. Same Tuesday morning.

The only difference was the direction I was looking.

The person who feels successful at 37 isn’t the one with the better resume. They’re the one who’s learned to measure themselves against their own past instead of everyone else’s present.

That’s not complacency. That’s not settling. That’s the most psychologically healthy thing you can do with a phone in your hand and an algorithm designed to make you feel inadequate.

Look backward. See how far you’ve come. And let that be the scoreboard that matters.