It happens enough across different people — friends, early career professionals, people otherwise doing fine — that it’s clearly not a personal failing. It’s just what the feed does. The platform’s user base is almost entirely 25-34. The exact career stage with the highest comparison anxiety. And unlike comparing yourself to a celebrity, this is people you actually know — former classmates, colleagues, people who started from the same place. Everyone is specifically measurable. The discomfort is structural, not incidental.
What makes it worse is that the feed curates itself. The 95% of people having normal, non-viral careers are largely invisible on it. What surfaces is promotions, funding rounds, recognitions, exits. The baseline gets distorted. Normal progression starts to look like failure because the only reference points available are the outliers. It’s survivorship bias dressed up as a newsfeed.
The data underneath all of it is worth knowing. When Harvard Business Review analysed the founders of the fastest-growing companies, the average age at founding was 45. Not 25. Not the guy in the hoodie from the TechCrunch profile. A 50-year-old entrepreneur is nearly twice as likely to build a runaway success as a 30-year-old. The ones who looked like they were falling behind in their thirties were often just still loading.
The queue is longer than the part of it you can see from where you’re standing. Comparison almost always happens in a narrow field of vision. The people ahead are visible. The bends in the road aren’t. What looks like someone pulling away is often just someone on a shorter loop — and eventually the loops stop being comparable at all because they’re pointed somewhere different.
The assumption that there’s one track, one pace, one finish line — that’s what the feed runs on. When everyone around you seems to believe it, it starts to feel like consensus. Consensus is hard to argue with, even when the evidence doesn’t support it.
Keep your work sharp. Keep your needs in check. It’s just a Tuesday morning.