A funny, slightly painful, mostly true story about men, mirrors, and the very old habit of wondering if the other guy is doing better than us.
Part One: The Bathroom Mirror Olympics
Let me start with a scene.
It is 11:47 p.m. A man named Kevin is standing in his bathroom. The light is bad. The light is always bad. Kevin is 27 years old. He works in insurance. He is a nice guy. His mom likes him. His dog loves him. His coworkers think he is “solid.”
Kevin lifts up his shirt. He turns to the side. He sucks in his stomach. He flexes.
Then he relaxes.
Then he flexes again, but this time he tries the “casual flex,” which is when you flex but pretend you are not flexing, in case somebody walks in. Nobody is going to walk in. Kevin lives alone. But the casual flex is a reflex now. It is muscle memory. It is the only muscle he is sure he has.
Kevin picks up his phone. He opens Instagram. Within eleven seconds he sees:
- A shirtless man on a boat in Greece.
- A man his age who just sold a company.
- A man doing a backflip off a cliff.
- An ad for a supplement that promises to make him “the most dangerous version of himself.”
- His high school friend Brad, holding a fish.
Kevin does not care about the fish. But somehow the fish also makes him feel bad.
He puts the phone down. He turns off the light. He goes to bed feeling like a slightly deflated bouncy castle.
Welcome to the Comparison Game. Everybody plays. Nobody wins. The prize is a stomach ache.
Part Two: Okay, But Is This Actually New?
Here is the part where I ruin the fun.
Men have been comparing themselves to other men since roughly the invention of men. Social media did not invent this. Social media just took an old, annoying human habit, put it on a rocket, added a scoreboard, and made it available 24 hours a day for free.
To prove this, I want to take you on a little tour of American history. Not the boring kind with dates you have to memorize. The fun kind, where you get to look at old guys and realize they were exactly as insecure as you are.
Let’s go.
Part Three: Benjamin Franklin and the World’s First Self-Improvement Checklist
Let’s start with Ben Franklin, because he was America’s original “grindset” guy.
Here is a real thing Benjamin Franklin did. In his twenties, he made a list of thirteen virtues he wanted to master. Things like Temperance, Silence, Order, Frugality, Industry, Humility. Then he made a little chart. A grid. And every single day, he would mark a black dot next to any virtue he failed at.
Let me repeat that. He made a self-hatred spreadsheet.
He carried it around. He filled it out at night. He tried to have a “clean” week with no black dots. He almost never did. He got especially destroyed by “Order,” because Ben Franklin, famous genius, was apparently a slob.
You know what that is? That is a habit-tracking app. That is Notion. That is one of those TikTok videos where a guy in a beige apartment says “here is my 5 a.m. routine” while cold plunging in a trash can.
Franklin was doing self-optimization content in 1726, and he was doing it with a quill.
And here is the important part: he was comparing himself to a made-up perfect version of himself that did not exist. He literally wrote out a fictional better Ben and then felt bad every day for not being that guy.
Sound familiar?
The only difference is that Ben Franklin’s imaginary rival lived on a piece of paper in his pocket. Your imaginary rival lives in your pocket too, but he has 400,000 followers and a personal chef.
Part Four: Eugen Sandow, the 1893 World’s Fair, and the Birth of the Shirtless Guy
Now let’s talk about muscles, because muscles are a huge part of the comparison game and they have a very specific American origin story.
For most of human history, being extremely muscular was not a status symbol for regular men. If you were super jacked in 1750, people did not say “wow, king.” They said “oh, that guy must do a lot of manual labor, poor thing.” Being soft and a little pale actually meant you were rich, because it meant you worked indoors and ate regularly.
Then came the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
At that fair, a showman named Florenz Ziegfeld presented a performer named Eugen Sandow. Sandow was a bodybuilder from Prussia. He would come out on stage, oil himself up, stand on a rotating platform under a spotlight, and just… pose. That was the act. He was not lifting a train. He was not fighting a bear. He was standing there being extremely shredded while thousands of Americans lost their minds.
Women fainted. Men stared. Newspapers wrote about him. And then something very important happened.
American men went home and thought: “Wait. I could look like that?”
No, buddy. You could not. But that did not matter. The idea had been planted. For the first time, mass numbers of ordinary American men had a single visual standard for what a “good body” looked like, and it was a professional performer standing under theatrical lighting, covered in oil, holding a pose he had practiced for years.
Rotating platform. Perfect lighting. Held pose. Oil.
That is a photoshoot. Eugen Sandow invented the thirst trap in 1893, and men have been quietly upset about it ever since.
Part Five: Charles Atlas and the Comic Book Guilt Trip
Fast forward to the 1920s and 1930s. Now we get to my favorite villain in this whole story: Charles Atlas.
Charles Atlas was a bodybuilder and businessman who ran the greatest guilt-based marketing campaign in American history. If you have ever seen an old comic book, you have seen his ad. It goes like this:
A skinny guy named Mac is at the beach with a girl. A big bully comes over and kicks sand in his face. The girl is embarrassed. Mac is humiliated. He goes home, looks in the mirror, and says the immortal line: “Darn it! I’m sick and tired of being a scarecrow!”
Then he orders Charles Atlas’s course. He gets huge. He goes back to the beach. He punches the bully. The girl now loves him and says, “Oh Mac! You ARE a real man after all!”
That ad ran for decades. In comic books. Which were read by children. So an entire generation of American boys learned, somewhere around age nine, that:
- Your body determines your worth.
- Women will leave you if you are skinny.
- Violence solves the problem.
- There is a product that fixes all of this for $30.
That is not an ad. That is a psychological operation.
And notice the structure, because it is exactly the same structure used by supplement companies, dating coaches, and “looksmaxxing” accounts today:
Step 1: Show you a version of yourself that is pathetic.
Step 2: Show you a rival who is better than you.
Step 3: Show you a woman who confirms you are inferior.
Step 4: Sell you the cure.
Charles Atlas did it with comic books. Today’s version does it with a fifteen-second video and a link in bio. Same soup, new microwave.
Also, quick note: Charles Atlas claimed he got his physique by watching a lion stretch at the zoo. The man built an empire on the fitness advice of “have you tried being a lion.” Genuinely, respect. That is the greatest sentence in marketing history.
Part Six: The Sears Catalog, or, The Original Infinite Scroll
Here is a piece of American history that nobody thinks about as social media, but absolutely was.
The Sears, Roebuck catalog. Late 1800s through most of the 1900s. It was called the “Wish Book.” It was hundreds of pages long. It got mailed to homes all over rural America, and families would sit around and look at it for hours.
Think about what that actually was. It was a giant scrollable feed of stuff you did not own, delivered directly to your house, designed to make you want things you did not previously know existed.
A farmer in Nebraska in 1902, who was completely content with his one pair of boots, opens the Wish Book and suddenly learns that there are eleven kinds of boots, and that men in the city are wearing a fancier kind, and that there is a whole page of pocket watches, and that his pocket watch is apparently the bad pocket watch.
Nobody in that farmer’s actual life owned the good pocket watch. His neighbors did not have it. His brother did not have it. But the catalog showed him a world of men who did, and now he felt behind.
That is the mechanism. That is the entire trick. Comparison requires a window into other people’s lives, and every time America invented a bigger window, men got more insecure.
Catalog. Radio. Movies. TV. Magazines. Internet. Phone.
Each one made the window bigger. The phone made the window infinite.
Part Seven: The Marlboro Man Was an Actor and He Was Bad at Riding Horses
In the 1950s, Marlboro had a problem. Their cigarettes were considered a “women’s” brand. So they hired an ad agency, which came up with the Marlboro Man: a rugged cowboy, alone on the range, squinting into the sunset, absolutely not talking about his feelings.
It worked. It worked so well that Marlboro went from a tiny brand to the best-selling cigarette in the world in a few years.
But here is the fun part. The Marlboro Man was not a cowboy. He was a series of models and actors. Some of them could barely ride. They were photographed in perfect golden-hour light by professional photographers who took hundreds of shots to get one usable image.
And yet, millions of American men looked at that picture and quietly measured themselves against it. Am I that tough? Am I that self-sufficient? Am I that comfortable being alone in the desert with no emotional support system and a lung condition?
This is the moment where I want to make a serious point in the middle of the jokes.
American masculinity has been shaped, for over a century, by professionally produced images of men who do not exist.
The cowboy who could not ride. The bodybuilder on a rotating platform. The comic book hero who punched the bully. And now, the influencer whose “casual morning routine” took a crew of three people and eleven takes.
Men have always been comparing themselves to a special effect.
Part Eight: But Okay, Social Media Really Did Make It Worse
Now, I have spent a lot of time saying “this is old.” And it is. But I do not want to be one of those people who says “eh, every generation has this” and then walks away whistling. Because something genuinely did change, and it changed in three specific ways.
Change One: The Comparison Pool Went Global
In 1955, if you were a guy in Toledo, Ohio, you compared yourself to the other guys in Toledo, Ohio. Maybe the local football star. Maybe your cousin who got a good job. Maybe Cary Grant, occasionally, at the movies.
That is a small group. And crucially, most of them were losing at something too. You could see Dave’s terrible car. You could see that Mike’s marriage was rocky. You knew the local rich guy’s dad gave him the business. Real life comes with context.
Today, you compare yourself to the entire planet. And not the average of the planet. The top of the planet. The algorithm does not show you a normal guy having a normal Tuesday. There is no engagement in that.
You are a regular man being asked to compete with a highlight reel assembled from eight billion people.
That is not a fair fight. That is not even a fight. That is a guy in flip-flops walking into the Olympics.
Change Two: It Never Turns Off
The Sears catalog came four times a year. The movie ended after two hours. The magazine got thrown away.
Your phone is in your hand right now. It is probably in your hand while you read this. It is in your hand at breakfast. It is in your hand on the toilet. It is in your hand at 1 a.m. when you cannot sleep, which is genuinely the worst possible time to look at pictures of successful men, because at 1 a.m. your brain has the emotional resilience of a wet napkin.
Estimates suggest the average person picks up their phone somewhere between 50 and 100 times a day. Even if only a fraction of those moments include a small comparison hit, you are absorbing hundreds of tiny “he is doing better than you” signals per week.
No individual one hurts. That is the trap. It is like drinking slightly bad water. One glass is fine. Ten years of it and something is wrong.
Change Three: The Feedback Loop
Old media was one-way. The Marlboro Man never looked back at you and gave you a score.
Social media does. It counts. It has numbers. Likes, followers, views, matches, comments. It turns your social life into a public leaderboard, and men are extremely, dangerously vulnerable to leaderboards. We will turn anything into a competition. We have competitive eating. We have competitive lawn care. There are men right now measuring their grass.
So when you give a man a number attached to his face, his humor, his body, and his personality, he is going to check that number. And then he is going to check it again. And then he is going to feel something about it, and he is not going to tell anybody what he felt.
Part Nine: What This Does to Confidence
Let’s talk about what actually happens inside a guy’s head.
Confidence is not really about being great at things. Confidence is about the gap between where you think you are and where you think you should be. Small gap, you feel fine. Big gap, you feel bad.
Social media does not usually make you worse at anything. It just relentlessly raises where you think you should be.
You were fine with your apartment until you saw a guy with a nicer one. You were fine with your job until you saw a guy your age who is a “founder.” You were fine with your face until you learned there is a word for your jawline and it is not a compliment.
This is the cruelest part of the whole thing. Social media does not lower your value. It just raises the price of admission.
And so you get men who are objectively doing fine — employed, healthy, funny, loved by their friends — who walk around feeling like they are failing. Not because anything went wrong, but because the standard quietly moved while they were not looking.
There is a term psychologists use for a related idea: relative deprivation. It is the finding that people’s happiness depends less on what they have and more on what they have compared to the people around them. The classic research example is that bronze medalists at the Olympics are often happier than silver medalists, because the silver medalist is comparing up (“I almost won gold”) while the bronze medalist is comparing down (“I almost got nothing”).
Social media has turned every man into a permanent silver medalist. Always comparing up. Never quite gold.
Part Ten: What This Does to Desire
Okay, now the awkward section. Let’s talk about desire, and let’s do it politely.
Comparison messes with desire in two directions, and both are a problem.
Direction one: it messes with what you want.
When you see hundreds of curated images every day, your brain starts treating that as the baseline. Not the exception. The baseline. And then real life shows up, and real life has pores, and bad angles, and a normal amount of body hair, and a laugh that is a little loud, and your brain — which has been marinating in a highlight reel — goes “hm.”
That “hm” is a lie. Your brain is comparing a real human being to a professionally lit still image. That is not a fair comparison and it never was, going all the way back to the guy on the rotating platform in 1893.
But the “hm” is powerful. And it can make men chronically unsatisfied with genuinely wonderful people, which is a tragedy played out in slow motion in a lot of relationships.
Direction two: it messes with what you think you are worth.
The other side is worse. A man who has spent five years absorbing the message that he is a 4 out of 10 will start behaving like a 4 out of 10. He will not approach anyone. He will not flirt. He will assume the answer is no before he asks. He will be weirdly grateful for basic kindness in a way that is uncomfortable for everyone.
Insecurity is not just an internal feeling. It leaks. It shows up in posture, in eye contact, in the way a guy apologizes for existing. And ironically, the thing that most reliably makes people attractive — being relaxed and genuinely present — is exactly the thing that comparison destroys.
You cannot be present when part of your brain is running a background program called “Am I Enough?” It eats the whole processor.
Part Eleven: What This Does to Intimacy
Here is the deepest cut.
Intimacy requires one thing above all else: the willingness to be seen without editing.
That is it. That is the whole game. Intimacy is the moment where you stop performing and someone gets to see the actual you, and they stay.
Now consider what social media has trained an entire generation of men to do. It has trained them to curate. To pick the best angle. To crop. To think about how something will look before they even do it. To manage an image constantly.
You cannot curate your way into intimacy. It does not work. The two things are opposites.
So you get men who are extremely good at presenting and extremely bad at revealing. They can be charming on a first date, funny in a text thread, impressive in a group. And then the moment things get real — the moment someone asks a question that requires an honest, unflattering answer — they short-circuit. They deflect with a joke. They change the subject. They go quiet.
Not because they are cold. Because nobody taught them how to be unedited, and everything in their environment rewarded the edit.
And here is where I will point out one more piece of American history, because it is relevant.
Historians and sociologists have written a lot about the decline of American male friendship. In the 1800s and early 1900s, American men joined things constantly. Fraternal orders. Lodges. The Elks, the Masons, the Odd Fellows. Bowling leagues. Union halls. Veterans’ groups. Church committees. Some estimates suggest that at the peak, a huge share of adult American men belonged to at least one fraternal organization.
These groups were often goofy. They had secret handshakes and silly hats. Genuinely, the hats were ridiculous. But they did something enormously important: they gave men a regular, low-pressure, in-person place to be around other men repeatedly over years.
That repetition is where real friendship grows. Not from one deep conversation, but from showing up two hundred times.
Those institutions have mostly faded. And a lot of men replaced them with… nothing. Or with a group chat. Or with a parasocial relationship with a podcast host who does not know they exist.
So now you have men who are comparing themselves to more people than ever, while being genuinely close to fewer people than ever. That is a brutal combination. That is high pressure and no release valve.
Part Twelve: The Great Male Silence
Here is a small experiment. Ask a man how he is doing. Really ask.
He will say “good.” He will say “can’t complain.” He will say “living the dream,” which is a phrase that men only use when they are extremely not living the dream.
Men are trained, from a very young age, to hide the comparison anxiety specifically. Because admitting you feel insecure about your body, your money, or your desirability is coded as the least masculine thing possible. It is seen as whining. It is seen as weak. Other men will make fun of you. Some women will lose attraction. You genuinely might get punished for saying it out loud.
So it goes underground. And underground, it gets weird.
It comes out as anger. It comes out as workaholism. It comes out as buying a truck that is far too large for anything he will ever do. It comes out as getting really into a supplement stack. It comes out as making fun of other men, which is just insecurity wearing a costume.
The Charles Atlas ad understood this perfectly, by the way. Look at the ad again. Mac does not go to therapy. Mac does not talk to a friend. Mac gets big and punches the guy. That has been the officially approved American solution to male insecurity for a hundred years: convert the feeling into a physical or financial result, and never speak of the feeling itself.
It kind of works. That is the annoying part. Insecurity is a genuinely powerful fuel. Plenty of successful men are running on it.
But it is a fuel that burns the engine. You cannot outrun a feeling forever. Eventually you get the promotion, or the body, or the girlfriend, and you notice that the feeling followed you there, and it has unpacked its bags, and it is asking what is for dinner.
Part Thirteen: So What Actually Helps?
Alright. I have made fun of Ben Franklin, Charles Atlas, a cowboy, and Kevin. Let me actually be useful now.
None of this is a life hack. There is no protocol. Anyone selling you a protocol is doing the Charles Atlas move on you. But here are some things that genuinely seem to move the needle.
1. Make the window smaller.
You do not have to quit social media. That advice is unrealistic and everyone ignores it. But you can shrink the window.
Unfollow the accounts that make you feel like garbage. Not the ones that are objectively bad — the ones that specifically make you feel bad. You know exactly which ones they are. You have known for a while.
Also: get the phone out of the bedroom. Almost nothing good has ever been decided about your self-worth after midnight. Midnight-you is not a reliable narrator. Midnight-you once decided you were going to learn Japanese.
2. Compare across time, not across people.
Here is a trick that actually works. Stop comparing yourself to other men and start comparing yourself to yourself, one year ago.
Ben Franklin, for all his spreadsheet madness, got one thing right here: he was tracking himself against himself. He was not tracking himself against John Adams. (Which is good, because John Adams was insufferable and it would not have gone well.)
Am I better than I was? Stronger, kinder, more skilled, more honest? That is a question with an actual answer and an actual path forward. “Am I better than a stranger on the internet?” is a question with no answer and no exit.
3. Get some in-person men in your life.
This is the big one. This is the boring one. This is the one everybody skips.
The single most reliable antidote to comparison anxiety is real friendship with real men who you see regularly, in person, over a long period of time. Because when you actually know a guy, you find out he is struggling too. And that knowledge is worth more than any amount of self-help content.
The internet shows you men’s results. Friendship shows you men’s process. And the process is always messier than the result.
You do not need a lodge with a silly hat. Although honestly, if you can find one, do it. Get the hat. Commit.
A weekly basketball run works. A standing dinner works. A dumb hobby group works. Anything that puts you in the same room as the same people, repeatedly, for years.
4. Practice being unedited on purpose.
Say one true, slightly uncomfortable thing per week to someone you trust. That is it. That is the whole exercise.
“I’ve been feeling behind lately.” “That thing you said bothered me.” “I’m actually pretty lonely.”
It will feel insane the first time. It gets easier. And it is the direct training exercise for intimacy, because intimacy is just this, repeated, with someone who stays.
5. Remember the oil.
Whenever you see an image of a man that makes you feel small, I want you to remember Eugen Sandow. Rotating platform. Spotlight. Practiced pose. Oil.
There is always oil. It might be lighting, or lens choice, or a good week, or a bad marriage he is not posting about, or a family loan he does not mention, or a decade of work compressed into a nine-second clip.
You are not seeing a man. You are seeing a poster of a man.
Part Fourteen: Kevin, Revisited
Let’s go back to Kevin.
It is a Friday, about eight months later. Kevin is not shredded. He did not sell a company. He has not been to Greece.
But a few things happened.
He deleted two apps. He got a bad night guard for his teeth because he was grinding them, which was a clue he ignored for two years. He started playing pickup soccer on Sundays with a group of guys, most of whom are worse at soccer than he is, which he enjoys enormously and will never admit.
One night, in the parking lot after the game, a guy named Marcus mentioned, very casually, that he had been feeling like a failure lately. Kevin, without really planning to, said, “Yeah. Me too, honestly.”
They stood there for a second. Then they talked about it for twenty minutes leaning on a car. Then they got tacos.
That is it. That is the whole breakthrough. There was no montage. Nobody punched a bully on a beach.
But Kevin got in his car afterward and noticed something strange. The background program had gone quiet. The one that runs all the time. The am I enough one. For about an hour, it just was not running.
He did not lift his shirt in the bathroom mirror that night. He forgot to.
That is what winning actually looks like. Not becoming the guy on the boat. Just forgetting, for a while, that the boat exists.
The Last Word
The comparison game is old. Older than the phone, older than the catalog, older than the shirtless guy in Chicago in 1893. Men have been quietly measuring themselves against other men for as long as there have been men and something to measure with.
What is new is the volume. You have been handed a device that runs the comparison at all times, against everyone, forever, for free.
You cannot win that game. Nobody can. The scoring system is broken on purpose.
So the move is not to get better at the game. The move is to look up from the phone, notice the actual room you are standing in, and find out who is in it.
The people in that room can see you. Not the poster. You.
And it turns out that is the only thing that ever actually helped.
Now go put your phone in the other room. Or at least stop flexing in the mirror.
Casually. We all know you are doing it casually.
