To compare is to despair

"Comparison is the thief of joy." —often attributed to Theodore Roosevelt, and weaponized daily by the digital world we live in.

In an age of filtered feeds and performance metrics, comparison is no longer a passing emotion—it’s a way of life. For people raised with smartphones and social platforms, the pressure to measure up has become both ambient and acute. “To compare is to despair” is more than a caution—it’s a diagnosis. And it’s quietly devastating a generation’s mental health, self-worth, and trust in institutions like higher education.

Documentary filmmaker Lauren Greenfield has been chronicling this culture of status anxiety for decades, from The Queen of Versailles to Generation Wealth. In her latest docuseries, Social Studies, she turns her lens toward teenagers navigating school, relationships, and identity—all through the distorting lens of the internet. In a media-saturated world, Greenfield argues, comparison has shifted from a social quirk to a psychological crisis. Teenagers now compare their lives not just with classmates or neighbors, but with curated content from the global elite, influencers, and AI-polished strangers. What Greenfield captures is the raw vulnerability of growing up under digital surveillance—the feeling that you’re never doing enough, never owning enough, never being enough.

This manufactured inadequacy bleeds directly into higher education. Universities don’t just market degrees; they market lifestyles, futures, identities. The elite college brochure is a fantasy of rooftop gardens, tech internships, and backpacking trips between semesters. Meanwhile, the lived reality for many students is debt, stress, food insecurity, and academic burnout. But even that struggle becomes content, aestheticized into productivity vlogs or “study with me” videos that offer a sanitized glimpse of chaos. In today’s world, even your suffering must be marketable.

Social media didn’t invent comparison culture, but it mechanized it. Platforms are built on engagement, and nothing engages like insecurity. You see the roommate who lands a six-figure tech job before graduation. You watch influencers turn their gap years into brands. You internalize their wins as your losses. This algorithmic envy operates in real time and at scale, colonizing your attention and monetizing your despair.

Comedy shows like The Daily Show have long satirized this trap, poking fun at everything from the elite college admissions racket to the corporate-speak of “personal branding.” In one segment, a correspondent joked that “success” now means optimizing yourself for LinkedIn before you’ve even figured out who you are. That’s the punchline of the meritocracy myth: you’re told that everything is possible if you just work hard enough—while quietly being outpaced by generational wealth, legacy admissions, and curated advantage.

Meanwhile, musical artists like Social Studies echo the emotional toll. Their lyrics speak to the distance between who we are and who we’re performing to be. That split—the psychological tension between self and spectacle—is the breeding ground of despair. It’s not just that others seem to be doing better; it’s that we no longer trust what “better” even means.

Higher education plays its part. Universities now sell the dream of transformation while enforcing systems of stratification. Your college isn’t just where you study—it becomes your brand, your future network, your worth. And when so much of that promise turns out to be hollow—when the degree doesn’t lead to stability, when the tuition bill becomes a lifelong debt—you don’t just feel disappointed. You feel defective. The system tells you the problem is you.

But the problem is structural. Comparison thrives in systems built on scarcity and spectacle. When there aren’t enough good jobs, enough affordable housing, enough room at the top, we’re trained to compete with each other rather than question the game. Greenfield’s work reminds us that these systems aren’t accidental—they’re profitable. In Social Studies, young people live their lives on screen while corporations harvest their data and self-esteem. The comparison economy runs on your insecurity.

To opt out—however imperfectly—is a quiet revolution. That might mean logging off. Or choosing a slower, less “optimized” path. Or resisting the urge to measure your value against someone else’s performance. Or just remembering that most of what you see is only half true. It might mean treating your own life not as a résumé or content stream, but as something real, worthy, and complex.

To compare is to despair. But to recognize comparison for what it is—a system, not a truth—is a first step toward something else.

Sources
Lauren Greenfield, Social Studies, FX / Hulu, 2024
Greenfield, Interview with Interview Magazine, 2024
“Social Media Swallowed Gen Z,” Wired, 2024
The Daily Show, segments on education and meritocracy
Social Studies, “Wind Up Wooden Heart,” 2010
Patricia Greenfield, Cultural Psychology and Individualism, UCLA
The Higher Education Inquirer archives