I don't use social media.

Deleted the apps years ago. Turned off the notifications. Built a fairly deliberate bubble around my daily life that keeps most of the noise out. I'm aware this makes me sound either very wise or very antisocial, depending on who you ask.

And I still compare.

Not often. Not obsessively. But it's there. An award gets announced in my industry and something flickers - not quite envy, more like a quiet, slightly irritating voice that says that should have been you. A prospect goes with another agency and I know that agency and I know, or at least I tell myself I know, that we'd have done it better. A small flicker. Gone quickly. But real.

I used to think comparison was a social media problem. Scrolling the highlight reel, watching everyone else's curated wins, measuring your ordinary Tuesday against someone else's best day. Delete the apps, I thought, and you largely delete the problem.

You don't, though.

The Romans wore different coloured robes to signal status. The Senate wore purple - not because purple was inherently superior, but because it was expensive, and expensive meant important, and important meant everyone else could see where you ranked. Marcus Aurelius noticed this and wrote something that has stayed with me ever since.

Purple robes, he said, are just robes dyed with shellfish.

That's it. That's the whole observation. The thing everyone was measuring themselves against and straining toward and using to establish their place in the world was just fabric dyed a particular colour. The comparison machine was running at full speed in ancient Rome, the same as it runs now, just with different raw material.

It was never a technology problem. It was always a human one.

I see it everywhere once you start looking.

In friends. In conversations where someone mentions what someone else is doing and a particular quiet settles over the room. In my wife, occasionally, when she catches herself measuring something that doesn't need measuring. In colleagues, in clients, in people I respect who are objectively doing well and still somehow find someone further ahead to feel behind.

And then there's the version that makes the point properly.

I asked my youngest, Isla-Rose, a few simple questions once. Do you think you're awesome? Yes! Do you love yourself? Yeah, of course, Dad! What do you love about yourself? Everything.

No hesitation. No asterisks. Just everything, stated like it was the most obvious answer in the world.

She's older now. And lately I've watched something shift - the way she stands at the mirror before school, checking her outfit. The small flicker of uncertainty about whether her hair is right. Nothing dramatic. Just the quiet arrival of a thing she didn't use to carry.

Nobody taught her this directly. Nobody sat her down and explained the ranking system. It just arrived. It's in the software.

Which tells you everything you need to know about where comparison actually comes from. Not from the algorithm. Not from the phone. From being human, in a world full of other humans, with a brain that evolved to track where you stood relative to the group.

Marcus wrote something else on this. How much time he gains who does not look to see what his neighbour says or does or thinks, but only at what he himself does.

He wasn't writing about Instagram. He was writing about Rome, where the comparison machine ran on gossip and status and who had the better seat at the forum. Two thousand years ago. Same wiring.

The Stoics understood that comparison is a tax on your attention. Every moment spent measuring yourself against someone else is a moment not spent on your own work, your own standard, your own direction. It doesn't tell you how you're doing. It tells you how you're doing relative to a reference point you didn't choose, in a race you didn't enter, toward a finish line that keeps moving.

There's one version of comparison that's worth keeping.

Not the horizontal one - measuring yourself against other people. The vertical one. Are you better than you were last year? Is the work better? Are you more patient, more present, more useful than twelve months ago?

That one has a reference point you can actually do something about.

The award that went to someone else, the prospect that chose another agency, the flicker of that should have been me - those are just purple robes. Someone dyed theirs a slightly different shade this week. It means about as much as Marcus said it did.

The kid at the mirror, though.

That one I'm paying attention to.

Until next time,

Broden Johnson