How do you stop comparing yourself to everyone else?

The short answer: you will not stop comparing, because comparison is how a social animal knows where it stands. You can change the thing you measure against. Measured against other people's displays, you will always lose. Measured against your own last year, you will usually find you have moved.

The urge is older than any feed and it is not going away. What has changed is the supply. You used to compare yourself to a few dozen people whose lives you could actually see. Now you compare yourself to thousands whose lives you can only see the chosen parts of.

Why it feels so bad now

Because the comparison is rigged, and you know it is rigged, and it works anyway.

A display is not a life. It is a selection from a life, made by the one person with the strongest motive to make it look good. You are comparing your whole day, including the parts you would never show, to the best eleven seconds of a stranger's. Knowing this does not help, because the part of you that compares does not read footnotes.

What comparison is actually for

It is a search. Underneath the envy is a question: what do I want? The people you cannot stop looking at are a map of your own wanting. Nobody is envious of things they do not care about.

So the useful move is not to stop looking. It is to look at the pattern. Who gets under your skin? What do they have in common? That is what you want, said in the only language you will listen to, and it is worth more than any amount of pretending to be above it.

The one comparison that works

Yourself, a year ago. Same person, same starting conditions, same unfair advantages and disadvantages. The only comparison in the world that is actually fair.

Most people, when they do this honestly, find that they have moved further than they thought. The movement was invisible because it happened a day at a time and nobody posted about it.

Write down where you were. Date it. Read it in a year. This is the whole method and it costs nothing.

Keep the displays out of the room

Not forever. Just out of the hours when you are tired, or low, or deciding something. A feed is a room full of people presenting themselves, and you would not make an important decision in a room like that. Do not make one with the room in your pocket.

Where this is in the book

The Celebration of Veils is the third scene of chapter two. A city throws a celebration in gardens lit like a constellation, and everyone in it is presenting a version of themselves, in a setting built for exactly that. The scene is careful about who slips, and about what the man at the centre of it does with the fact that he cannot tell the displays from the people.