We Focus on the Things We Think We’re Good at, and we Judge That Based on Comparisons to Others

I had a sort of epiphany today. I’ve long been formulating a sort of theory that humans have a need to feel special. I won’t go into too much detail on the base theory here, but basically it says that this need to feel special drives almost all of our behavior.

My epiphany is basically that we like things we feel we are good at, and we feel we are good at things if we can do them better than other people.

That maybe sounds very obvious and without any need of further explanation, but I think it’s actually relatively profound.

Let me explain how I got here.

I went for a run today. It wasn’t very far (less than a mile), and I did it quite slowly. I’m not in running shape, okay?

It wasn’t the most enjoyable and I definitely felt slow.

But then a thought occurred to me, “if it felt exactly the same as this, but I had completed it in a time that was better than the vast majority of people, would I like it more?”

And I realized the answer would be a resounding “yes”.

I also remember some times when I was running regularly, and I was way faster, and I did, in fact, like it way more.

We are always gauging our own performance against that of others. In basically everything. For the purposes of this post, I want to focus the discussion on skills and performance vs. other metrics and comparison.

I play guitar. Now that I’m older, other guitar players around me tend to be way better than me.

But if I could play at this level when I was in 9th grade, I’d feel like I was incredible. And by comparison: I would be. Most kids were just starting to play.

When thinking about it more, I realized that there are likely evolutionary reasons why things would work this way.

In contrast with Neanderthals, humans inherently form groups and societies. We don’t really ever survive out on our own. Societies evolved along with us.

And one of the things that makes our societies so effective is specialization. No one person can be great at everything. There just isn’t enough time to practice and learn enough about more than a few things, and our brains are likely not even capable of handling the extra workload.

So instead, we specialize.

But how do we choose what to specialize in?

I’m sure the answer is quite complicated, but my theory is that it’s basically what I’ve described above.

When you feel you are better than your peers at something, you enjoy it much more. And then you tend to spend more time on it, and get even better at it.

If you feel you are worse than others at something, you don’t enjoy it as much and you tend to give it up.

The key component of this system is “comparison with others”. By doing so, you ensure a broad range of specialization within a group. You only focus on what you do better than everyone else, and they do the same.

I imagine that feeling like you’re better than others at something also fills you with purpose and pride, leading you to feel good about yourself and more effective overall. It’s a reward for following our prewired specialization script.

It’s a pretty ingenuous system that ensures human groups are as effective as possible at ensuring the survival of the species and that everyone is contributing to the best of their ability.

Thinking to modern society, I suspect there may be real problems here. We know so many people and can see tons of really-talented people online, and the result is that most people don’t feel like they are actually that good at anything.

As a result, they don’t put time and effort into anything, and their self-esteem and sense of purpose suffer greatly.

Perhaps that’s really the greatest problem with social media.

There’s a lot to consider with this. I’ll have to revisit it and think through some more.