We live in an incredibly overstimulated world. The number of triggers and irritating information around us is enormous.
And gradually, a person increasingly needs protection from the flow of excitement that pours on him from the outside.
One of the sources of this arousal is the constant provocation of comparison. And these comparisons are usually not in one's favor.
A person could be perfectly happy with their job, apartment, or car. But then a voice from an ad, social media, or their immediate circle appears and says:
What you have is so-so. But what your neighbor, friend, or random guy from the ad has is real, proper, and good.
And so it began...
What is a social trigger of dissatisfaction?
This is an external signal that causes a feeling of deficiency:
- "I don't have enough";
- "I'm falling behind";
- "Something's wrong with me";
- "I'm living my life incorrectly."
Moreover, five minutes before this, a person might not have considered this a problem at all.
There are many such triggers, and we often receive the first of them in our families.
Parents may sincerely believe that this is how they motivate their child to become better, but in reality they regularly frustrate and devalue them through:
- comparison to others: academic performance, appearance, athletic or artistic achievements, abilities;
- social age norms: "At your age, it's time...";
- admiration for others' achievements: "Look what Masha has accomplished!"
Later, triggers start pouring in from everywhere
- from people's questions: "When are you getting married?", "Why are you still renting?", "When are you having kids?";
- from advertising and the entire self-improvement industry, which constantly explains what we lack;
- from our immediate circle, where achievements are quickly devalued: "So what? Masha has...";
- from our professional environment, where the bar for what's normal is constantly shifting;
- from social media, where we see carefully curated displays of other people's success every day.
But why will one person look at someone else's new car and calmly move on, while another will suddenly become dissatisfied with his own?
When the external signal matches the internal one
The external message is especially powerful when it coincides with the internal one:
- "Be the best."
- "Try hard."
- "Make others happy."
- "Be strong."
- "You must do everything."
Such internal attitudes provide a person with conditional well-being: I can feel good, but only on condition that I meet certain requirements.
In transactional analysis, such attitudes are called drivers.
Their peculiarity is that it is almost impossible to finally implement them.
You can't just become good enough, strong enough, diligent enough, or completely please everyone one day.
Moreover, the social environment actively supports driver behavior.
Advertising is particularly prone to appeal to "Be the best" and "Make others happy." School, professional environments, the media, and social norms can also reinforce the idea that a successful person is someone who constantly strives, achieves, meets the standards, improves, and never stops.
How a vicious circle arises
Social signal → comparison → detection of “deficit” → attempt to eliminate it → brief relief → new bar → new deficit.
Therefore, achieving what you want does not always bring satisfaction.
A person gets what he was striving for, calms down for a while, and soon discovers the next point of discrepancy.
Why is this mechanism even maintained?
A logical question arises: why is a mechanism that repeatedly leads to frustration maintained?
Because drivers also have a protective function.
They offer a ready-made answer to the question:
"What should I do to make everything okay?"
Try hard. Be strong. Be better. Make people happy with you.
This is much easier than facing another question:
"What do I really want?"
The ability to listen to oneself may simply not be cultivated.
Moreover, one's own desires can be associated with selfishness, weakness, laziness or wrongness.
And then a person feels dissatisfaction and a desire to change something, but instead of exploring his own desire, he habitually grabs a ready-made external reference point.
And again he finds no satisfaction.
Is this my wish, or was it just created for me?
The point is not to declare all social influence harmful.
Sometimes comparison really does help you notice your own dissatisfaction.
I saw how another person lives, and suddenly I realized: it turns out that I, too, have been wanting change for a long time.
It is important to learn to distinguish:
Has my desire been discovered - or have they just created dissatisfaction for me?
To do this, you can ask yourself a few questions:
- Was I unhappy with this before I saw or heard it?
- If no one ever finds out about this, do I still want it?
- What exactly will change in my life if I get this?
And then we can move on to a much more complex study:
What do I really want?
Sometimes we need distance from other people's expectations
It is no coincidence that many cultures have practices of temporarily separating young people from their familiar environment: living separately from their parents, traveling, and periods of independence.
Distance from familiar demands and expectations gives you the opportunity to hear your own desires and begin making plans that are at least somewhat independent of social triggers.
And in adult life, we sometimes need roughly the same thing - at least a psychological distance from the constant stream of other people's ideas about what our life should be.
Because sometimes the problem isn't that we have too little.
And the fact is that too often we are shown how much more we supposedly need.
And through the provocation of dissatisfaction, they force us to feel unhappy and to do things that we had absolutely no intention of doing just yesterday.
Can you remember something you were quite happy with until you saw that others had it "better"?
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Tamara Shaposhnikova Psychotherapist, psychologist in the country of origin, PhD in pedagogy, associate professor, psychotherapist of the Unified Register of Europe, Corresponding Member of the International Academy of Postgraduate Education.