Open your phone in the evening and the scoreboard is already there. A school friend has been made a manager. A cousin has bought a flat. Someone from your college group is posting wedding photos from a heritage hotel in Rajasthan.
Five minutes ago you were perfectly fine with your day, and now you are quietly doing maths about your own life.
In 1954, psychologist Leon Festinger published his theory of social comparison, built on a simple observation. When there is no clear yardstick for how we are doing, we look at other people to find one. Am I good at my job? Am I earning enough? Am I late? We almost never answer these questions in isolation.
The habit is even older than the theory. The phrase “keeping up with the Joneses” comes from a comic strip by Arthur “Pop” Momand, which started in the New York Globe in 1913. The funny part is that the Joneses never actually appeared in the strip. They were just the neighbours that everyone else measured themselves against, and that is still how it works today.
Most of us also carry a timetable in our heads. Finish studies by this age, find a stable job, get a promotion, get married, buy a house, have children. Nobody handed us this list, but somehow we all know it by heart. In India, relatives and neighbours are happy to check our progress with a casual “so, what next?” at every family function.
Nothing in science says life has to happen in this order or by these ages. The timetable is just a habit of society, and it changes from city to city, family to family and generation to generation. Someone who is “late” by one family’s clock can be perfectly on time by another’s.
Careers get the same treatment. A job title, a salary band or the name of a company becomes shorthand for success, mainly because it is easy to compare. Whether you actually enjoy the work, or sleep well at night, is much harder to put on a LinkedIn post.
Weddings are probably the clearest example. They are public, they are photographed from every angle, and everyone attending feels entitled to an opinion. According to a Jefferies report, Indians spend about ₹12 lakh on an average wedding, which is roughly twice what the same report estimates a family spends on 18 years of education. The trade body CAIT expected the 2025 wedding season to bring in around ₹6.5 lakh crore of business from about 46 lakh weddings.
Of course, weddings are also about joy, rituals and family, and plenty of families spend happily. But it is fair to ask how much of the budget is for the couple, and how much is for the guests who will be watching. When a loan is taken only to match a cousin’s venue, the comparison has stopped being harmless.
What has changed in recent years is the audience. We used to compare ourselves with a few relatives and neighbours, and it ended when the family function did. Now it follows us to bed. We are watching hundreds of people at once, and mostly their best moments. Nobody posts the rejection email or the dull Tuesday afternoon.
A 2018 experiment by Melissa Hunt and her colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania gives a small clue about what this does to us. They asked 143 undergraduate students either to use Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat as usual, or to limit each app to ten minutes a day for three weeks. The students who cut back reported significantly less loneliness and depression.
To be fair, the study was small and only involved students, and other measures such as anxiety and self-esteem did not differ between the two groups. So it does not prove that social media ruins lives. It does suggest that the amount of time we spend on these apps can change how we feel.
It would also be unfair to say that comparison is always bad. Watching a friend start a business or pick up a new skill can push us to try something ourselves. The trouble begins when comparison takes the place of our own questions. Keeping up with someone is fine if you also want to go where they are going. It becomes tiring when you never stopped to ask where that is.
So, are we living our lives or just keeping up? For most of us it is probably a bit of both. A few simple questions might help. Would I still want this if nobody could see it? Whose timetable am I following? What would “enough” look like for me?
Success does not have to mean a promotion, a flat and a big wedding. For some people it is a quiet job and more time with family, and for others it is a risky start-up, and both are fine. The real danger is not being behind. It is ticking off everything on the list and realising it was never your list.
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