Growing up, taking physical education classes in the American public school system meant undergoing annual tests of physical aptitude. In addition to our usual games of tag and dodgeball, every so often we would line up, one by one, while our PE teacher assessed how many pull-ups we could do and how close we could get to touching our toes.
Then, of course, there was the FitnessGram Pacer Test, dreaded by elementary schoolers nationwide. For those unfamiliar, this test (better known as “the Pacer”) consisted of running back and forth across a gym before a buzzer sounded. The intervals between the buzzer going off got increasingly shorter, causing students to run faster and faster. If you couldn’t get to the wall before the buzzer sounded, you had to sit out. Many students ended up sitting out after ten minutes or so of the test. Eventually, after another fifteen to twenty, there were just a couple of students running across the gym, sweat beading off their brows, as the other kids sat cross-legged on the gym perimeter and watched. The test made clear, quite systematically, who the fastest kids in the class were. And in what order. Everyone could easily ascertain where they stacked up compared to the others, and thus, which kids you wanted to pick for your dodgeball team.
The Pacer test is one of the most explicit examples of surveillance early on in a child’s life. Not only are you surveying your classmates, taking note of how fast they are and who is faster than who, but you’re also taking yourself into account. Where do I stand in the ranks? I might not be the fastest one here, but maybe I can be the fastest girl? Or at least just faster than that person?
In America, comparison is a technique learned early in life. It’s not just a practice one learns through friendly competition laden in recreational sports, but through the hierarchies that are embedded into our systems and institutions. Hierarchies, of course, are the bedrocks upon which our country was founded. We know how to govern a country better than these people, so we must leave these people. Manifest destiny was bestowed onto our people because we’re the best, so it’s okay if we wipe out this population’s home and exploit this population’s labor for our own gain. The way Americans know how to live - how to comprehend the sum of their value - is through comparing it to the value of others.
I think it’s generally known that comparison is a toxic behavior to engage in, especially when it comes to internet activity. Numerous studies abound citing social comparison as a reason why social media is so noxious, particularly for young girls and women. It’s not too difficult to see how social media came to be a competitive arena for women. Facebook in itself was conceived via a stroke of misogyny. The seeds of the app were planted when a college-aged Mark Zuckerberg created Facesmash, a website that compared his girl classmates to farm animals and allowed site viewers to vote on who was hotter.
Today, it’s quite easy to become affected by what one sees on Instagram and other sites that once deemed themselves conduits for social connection. In my opinion, there was never a time when Instagram was a place containing truly authentic accounts of peoples’ lives. But today, with it increasingly transforming into a marketplace, it’s even easier to become discouraged when comparing oneself to the glossy mirages of sponsored posts.
For the most part though, we all know this. We know that looking at hundreds of curated, retouched faces in an endless scroll is not particularly kind to our mental health, in part due to the comparison that can emerge. Nonetheless, comparison still lingers just below the surface of our subconscious like a ravenous crocodile. Both consciously or unconsciously, it’s challenging for people to define their worth in a way that’s not also correlated to the worth of another person. Or a metric that was defined by another person.
We survey ourselves in the same ways that we surveyed our classmates running the Pacer. We receive graded tests back from our teachers, and can’t help but peer over the shoulders of our classmates to see how much better or worse we performed. We watch a Tik Toker run through “what they ate in a day,” and can’t help but compare their quantity of macronutrient intake to our own. We walk into a party and can easily assess whether we’re overdressed, underdressed, or dressed just right.
In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), French philosopher Michel Foucault describes surveillance as a disciplinary technique used to rank, order and normalize individuals. Comparing ourselves to others allows us to understand how exactly to act. We survey ourselves and others as a way to conform. In some cases, I suppose it’s necessary (few people like arriving at an event not in accordance with the dress code). But in other ways, it leads to a flattening of the self, in which some traits and desires must be dampened down to accommodate for the norm.
Worse even, gaining validation from comparison isn’t possible without imposing a hierarchy between yourself and another person. And whether you land on top of the pyramid or fall to the bottom, you’re still exhibiting bias by deeming some traits less desirable than others. Such a dynamic is most glaring in the case of physical appearance. How many people do you know claim to think old people are beautiful but then engage in anti-aging beauty regimes? Or champion “body positivity” and “size inclusivity” but fear gaining weight? Engaging in these rituals of self-surveillance and comparison not only imposes prejudice upon oneself but upon the people whose traits they’re trying to avoid.
People who engage in self-surveillance and comparison (just about everyone) aren’t always outwardly malicious people. They’re often even people who mean well. As I mentioned earlier, hierarchy is baked into the conception of so many of our common institutions, whether that be capitalism, Facebook, and even attempts at democracy. It’s the prism we’ve been taught to view the world through.
In America, one of the wealthiest countries in the world, we’ve been made to think there’s a drought and that the only way one can get a sip of water is to claw their way to the top. The people who deserve the best should get the best, so you better prove you deserve the best - regardless of if the competition actually means anything to you. Our scarcity mentality is a direct outcome of hierarchy.
It’s hard to imagine what the country - and world - might look like if people didn’t feel like they needed to be the smartest, cleverest, and most beautiful people in the country to deserve things as basic as healthcare, a place to live, and someone to love them back. What kinds of self-expression might be afforded? What kinds of alternate paths? What kinds of self-acceptance?
There’s confusion online about whether the quote “comparison is the thief of joy” was first said in the Bible or by Teddy Roosevelt. Regardless of the source, the quote holds some truth. But to simply ask readers to quit comparison is like asking a serial smoker to simply give up cigarettes.
To truly cleanse ourselves of our hierarchical mentalities, we must transform our scarcity mentality into one rich with abundance. This requires a re-wiring of our brains - recognizing that viewing the world through a finite lens is arbitrary. We can envision a world in which everyone has the ability to fulfill their purpose in their own unique way, and how much more beneficial that would be for humans on micro and macro levels. We can interrogate our own implicit biases that subjectively deem some traits undesirable and other traits advantageous for no real reason.
To truly become the best versions of ourselves, we don’t need to be the best - the smartest, the hottest, the cleverest. Most of our own personal heroes aren’t people who were able to tick all the boxes and climb to the top of the pyramid with ease, but rather those who deviated from the norm and leaned into what made them uniquely them. Why shouldn’t we do the same?
the rewriting part is sooooo important
I relate to this article so much ! I wish we could change this ongoing calibration .