Jun 7, 2023 9 min read Blog

Comparison is the Thief of Joy

I'm addicted to my phone.

Apologies for the prolonged absence - it's been rather busy recently.

It is well established that comparing ourselves to others makes us miserable.

We watch the neighbours pull swiftly into their driveway with their shiny new car, wondering "How on earth can they afford that?", before we then slide our phone out of our pocket only to see our not-so-much-friend-as-acquaintance from university off on yet another glamorous holiday - of course flying business class as usual.

Oh look - Jemima's three impeccably dressed and suspiciously well-behaved children have all got matching iphones. How nice.

You weren't miserable six minutes ago, but you are now.

We're competitive social creatures by nature. All throughout evolution we have sought to impress and dominate, one-upping each other and putting on displays of power and authority, in order to improve our individual chances of survival, of power and most importantly - of reproduction.

But while this characteristic is enormously helpful in a hunter-gatherer tribe picking its way through the jungle and traversing plains studded with bison and lions, it's not so helpful when it comes to modern day, and particularly western life.

I'm happy when I'm not looking.

My life is spectacular. I'm quite positively the luckiest person I know, and every day I am overwhelmed with gratitude for how fortunate I have been to get to live the life that I do, in this day and age, with the people around me that I have been so lucky to meet.

I have not met a single person in my life, with whom I would choose to swap lives.

I want for nothing, I have all the creature comforts and love that I could ever possibly dream of, and I'm certain that there are literally billions of people living in the world today who would swap lives with me in an instant.

It only takes a quick trip to one of England's many fabulous castles to realise that not even the most powerful kings in the world could have the sort of luxuries that we take for granted every day, purely by virtue of the time in which they existed, five hundred years before the daily Instagram reminder that my life isn't good enough.

Running water
Sanitation
Antibiotics
A life expectancy above sixty
Safe childbirth
Electricity

Literally no amount of money in the world could have provided King Henry the Eighth with any one of these things that we don't even think about as being luxuries today. In fact they're so abundantly available that they're referred to as commodities.

And yet somehow we're still miserable.

This is why anxiety and depression are on the rise.

This is my hunch. I have not conducted any scientifically rigorous studies to back this up, it's purely a thought conjecture that makes sense to me.

I very strongly believe that the stratospheric rise in anxiety and depression, particularly among young adults and teenagers - is that we simply know too much.

Not in that we have vast amounts of knowledge per se, rather that we are aware of so much more than we've evolved to safely process.

Back in the paleolithic days of living in small tribes that moved, hunted and lived together, we only knew about the goings-on of the tribe itself. We knew everyone in the group, we worked together and we looked out for each other, because it directly improved our chances of survival.

We were one big family, with a common enemy - everything outside the tribe

We had absolutely zero idea what was happening over in the next valley, so we couldn't worry about it. Which was helpful, because there was naff all we could do about it, so we lived on in blissful ignorance of the goings on elsewhere in the world, focusing our attention where it mattered - the tribe and its survival.

Now we see everything.

If I pull my phone out of my pocket and open up any social media platform, within seconds I can know what's happening in the next village, the next city, the next country and the next continent, all at the push of a button.

Floods, hyperinflation, human rights atrocities, evil dictators with plans for world domination, Janet's conspiracy theory about listening devices in toasters - I can hear it all.

There's still naff all I can do about it, but the difference is I'm painfully aware of it, and because my brain hasn't evolved beyond 6000 BC, it immediately assumes that because I'm aware of a potential threat or concern - it must immediately be of relevance to me - and so I become anxious and stressed about something that will never affect me.

And to make things worse, we no longer have a tribe to protect us. If we're very lucky we live in a small nuclear family, possibly with some extended family vaguely nearby and maybe some friends as well. But the concept of a close-knit tribe has long gone, so we're lost and alone, and scared.

No wonder we see so much tribalism online, whether it's politics, climate change or vaccines - people just want to belong to a group again.

This is why I no longer read the news. Partly because I don't feel I can trust any particular outlet anymore, but largely because it's almost never going to directly impact on my life, but it will always cause me unnecessary anxiety - so what's the point?

Instagram is no different.

The same goes for seeing other people sharing their 'best' moments on Facebook and Instagram - we get fed an entirely unrealistic portrayal of how other people live their lives.

Most of the time, if you're fortunate enough to live an enjoyable life, you potter along doing your usual activities, and every so often, something exceptionally positive may happen. You thus might choose to document this occasion, with a photo, video, diary entry - whatever.

You might even wish to share this moment with others, whether that's immediate family and friends who will genuinely feel a sense of vicarious pleasure on your behalf, or to an ocean of strangers who will most likely feel a little more miserable when they see your life going better than theirs.

This is why it's so damaging - we only see the highlights of other people's lives, but we live through all the lows of our own life. Our brains then assume that, since we're not seeing them - other people simply don't have lows in their lives, and they must live in a perfect utopic dreamstate that you couldn't possibly achieve for yourself.

Or maybe you can if only you buy this new eyeliner, phone, or take out a lease plan on a shiny new Volvo.

It's such a toxic feedback loop that people resort to faking experiences with the sole intention of posting online to give the illusion of a better life than they're actually living.

You can pay to sit in the window seat of a private jet, on the tarmac, purely to take pictures for your social media accounts. That's right, when you see someone sat looking wistfully out of a plane window, there's a good-to-fair chance that plane is still on the ground, and they're going nowhere.

And I want no part of it.

I'm an addict

I'm ashamed to admit it, but it's time I got real with myself.

I am a total internet junkie, and I have a problem.

I'm a millenial who grew up with a childhood of 'be back at 8's and 'I'll meet you here at this time's because mobile phones didn't exist until I was a teenager. Long summer evenings of kicking a ball against the wall of the house and riding my bike up and down the street because I wasn't allowed to watch television and there damn sure wasn't anything else to do.

Since then the capability and functionality of the supercomputer sat in my pocket has exploded, and it has reached the point where the little screen has become genuinely more interesting than the outside world.

It's unsurprising, given that's exactly how it's been designed. Every app, icon, button, scroll, tap, touch, tweet, like - everything - has had an entire team of engineers working tirelessly to make it as addictive as possible.

That's right, every single aspect of your phone has been specifically created to make it as appealing to use and as attention-grabbing as possible, and the effect is greater stimulation of dopamine release, leaving us coming back begging for more.

It's affecting the relationship I have with my children.

I will quite honestly say there are frequently times when I'm sat with my wonderful children, who are enganged in some wholesome, meaningful activity that parents are meant to have with their little ones, and my mind is wandering off, wondering what might be going on on Twitter, or whether I have had any emails, or if there's anything cool on TikTok that I could do with the kids in the future.

It's appalling and I'm totally ashamed of myself, but when you think about how deliberately and expertly designed the phone has been to steal my attention from the real world - can I really blame myself?

No - but I can recognise the problem and take responsibility to make positive changes now.

Here are some of the excuses I come up with to justify my behaviour:

I claim to be using twitter for 'research' for homeschool stuff
I'm just 'checking' that nothing important has come through on my emails
I'm taking a photo to send to mummy at work
I'm just 'checking' to see if there are any cool activities on TikTok that we could do as a family
I'm just 'checking' the weather for tomorrow
I'm still checking
I'm always checking

The reality is I'm just distracting myself from the comparatively 'dull' reality, because like a cocaine-riddled lab rat pressing the lever for the next hit - I'm addicted.

The truth is that reality is not dull. It's a rich and beautiful existence filled with wonderful experiences. All five senses being stimulated all the time, if only I learned to pay proper attention to the here and the now.

That's how stimulating the phone is. And I need to change my behaviour, because my kids are growing up.

What makes me happy

I've noticed a very profound trend over the last few weeks that has made me absolutely determined to set new habits into motion for the benefit of my own health and wellbeing - both physical and mental - as well as that of my family.

There are three main things that make me happy over anything else:

Not being on social media
Being outside with my family
Writing

I'm writing this now because it's therapy for me. I'm not writing for anyone else, and I don't care in the slightest if anyone ever reads it, because that's not the point of the exercise.

The point is to vent my ideas out onto the page, watching as the little letters sprout their merry way over the screen, and feeling that weight of cognitive burden melt away as the worries and nagging thoughts take shape in physical, albeit digital, form that I can then compartmentalise and comprehend.

As for being outside - when was the last time you felt grass underneath your bare feet? The sheer chidlike joy of running around barefoot in a grassy field and falling over into patches of daisies seems to get lost once our ages wander into the double digits, and we are doomed to watch enviously as our flexible and back-pain-free little ones romp gleefully around, blissfully unaware of anything else but the here and now.

All three of these have important implications for how we raise our kids, and they feed into our decision to homeschool.

My children have the most wonderful imaginations and watching them play together using nothing but a stick and some leaves to construct the narrative of their games is inspiring. Their unbound creativity and ability to be totally present in what they are doing is something I envy on a daily basis.

But you need a healthy degree of boredom to maintain this.

As adults we stop being bored, because we replace it with being busy. We occupy our time with chores and responsibilities and pass it off as 'being a grown up'.

The knock-on effect is we lose the ability to enjoy the moment and let our minds wander off to interesting places.

This effect is amplified when you then add in a phone, filling every spare second with dopamine-swilling stimulation, leaving us with no spare brain-time, not even when we go to the loo.

There's no way this is good for us.

Being outside

My hope is that our children will spend a large proportion of their childhood outside, and not stuck inside a concrete box, watching out the window and waiting for the bell to ring so they can finally go and play.

Marie and I often discuss the idea of social media for the kids, and how we're going to navigate through the world of parenting in the modern age. At the moment, the kids don't need it and don't miss anything as a result. One of our concerns about school is unsupervised exposure to large numbers of other children with unlimited access to addictive and harmful technology - something that simply wasn't a concern for my own parents when I was growing up.

Writing

Children are natural storytellers, from the day they learn to speak they begin constructing entire narratives and plot lines, even if they aren't able to convey them quite as eloquently as they might like.

The benefits of regular writing, in any context at all, are well established, and it is my hope that our kids develop a love for language and writing their thoughts down, if only to help them make sense of the world and their own mind, as it has done for me.

For example I have just spent a blissful hour and a half bashing the keys and pouring this literary concoction onto my laptop - and it feels wonderful.

My vow moving forward

These are my aims from this day onward, and I don't pretend for a second that I'm going to be strong enough to stick to them all the time, but I'm going to do my best: