Comparison is inevitable
I'm sure you've all heard of Imposter Syndrome in one way or another by now. It's the feeling of being a fraud in the sense that you don't deserve to be where you are, like you have somehow faked your way up. I first heard about it on Matt D'Avella's Podcast The Ground Up Show, the episode he did with Tommy and Josh, you can find it here; I'd highly recommend you give it a listen. Imposter Syndrome is something that really kicks in when you compare yourself and your work to others, especially in a university setting leading up to deadlines. I know in my case, up until recently, the comparison didn't finish after hand-in; if I felt my work was below par before hand-in, then when I got my results and I had done better than expected, I felt I had cheated and the markers had unfairly given me the benefit of the doubt. Although I have mostly left this way of thinking behind me, I find it creeping up as my last ever university deadline approaches.
This also brings us back to the social media argument on its psychological effects. This term has been especially difficult when seeing other course-mates work on Instagram; it's great that they're doing incredible work, but you immediately start measuring their work against yours. What you don't see is them also comparing their work to the people they follow. You haven't seen the hundreds of failed projects that lead to this success or the failed images from the same shoot. When seeing this success, we immediately think of our failed images almost as an assurance that we are right in doubting ourselves.
Comparison can also be a positive way to kick you into action, but it can also trigger your fight-or-flight instincts; you either push yourself to create more work or recluse and stop creating. The latter comes from fear of failing, seeing no point in trying because someone is doing better than you. This is when we need to understand that being the best isn't necessarily the goal, because it's unrealistic and unattainable for a lot of us. Instead of this fight or flight instinct, we should push it aside and carry on with what we were doing before we saw the Instagram post, understanding that comparison in a lateral and one-dimensional view is worthless when we are multi-dimensional people who create complexly different work.
To truly be happy, you have to find a way to be sure of yourself. In the most recent episode of the podcast, Anna Morgan exclaims that you need to be on your own side before anyone else can be. For anyone else to believe in your work, you need to believe in it yourself, which means putting yourself down because someone else has produced more physical content than you is wrong. Comparison can be healthy in small doses if it’s beneficial to you as an individual. If it’s anything but that, then staying away from a platform that’s full of people flexing their work when you’re trying to cool it on the self-doubt front is probably the best idea. We have all heard it at least 300 times in our lives, but quantity absolutely does not equal quality, so pushing through the tendency to recluse, and embracing the feeling of imperfection is one step further to breaking free of the 'comparison trap'.
