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182 - The Comparison Trap in the Instagram Age · The Nerdy Photographer Podcast

• 0:03
  Casey Fatchett: Welcome back to the Nerdy Photographer podcast.
• 0:06
  Today, we're not talking about glass or sensors or file formats
• 0:09
  or backups or any of that stuff. We're talking about something
• 0:11
  that quietly does more damage to photographers' creative
• 0:14
  development than bad gear or poor technique could ever do:
• 0:19
  the comparison trap. If you spent any time on Instagram,
• 0:22
  Flickr, or any photography community online, or pretty much
• 0:26
  any social media channel, you know that feeling. You finish a
• 0:29
  shoot you are genuinely proud of. You sit down, edit your
• 0:32
  favorites, post one or two or three pictures, and then almost
• 0:35
  involuntarily you start scrolling. Within about 30
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  seconds, you've seen three photographers whose work makes
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  you feel inadequate? The image you were proud of an hour ago
• 0:45
  now looks amateur in your brain, and somehow in the back of your
• 0:49
  head, a voice starts asking whether you're actually good
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  enough to be doing this. That feeling is not a character flaw.
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  It's not a weakness. It's a completely predictable response
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  to a specific psychological mechanism that social media
• 1:03
  platforms have been extraordinarily good at
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  exploiting, and once you understand the mechanism behind
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  it, you can start to work around it. All right, let's talk about
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  the psychology of social comparison. In 1954, a
• 1:16
  psychologist named Leon Festinger published a paper
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  introducing social comparison theory. The core idea is this:
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  human beings have a fundamental drive to evaluate their own
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  opinions and abilities, and in the absence of objective
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  standards, we do that by comparing ourselves to other
• 1:33
  people. This was an adaptive trait for most of human history.
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  Looking around at your peer group and calibrating your
• 1:39
  skills relative to theirs gave you useful information. It told
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  you where you stood, where you needed to improve, who you could
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  learn from. In a small community where the people you were
• 1:49
  comparing yourself to were living roughly the same life
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  under roughly the same scenario and conditions, this was a very
• 1:55
  reasonable system. Social media broke that system completely
• 1:59
  because now your quote-unquote peer group you're unconsciously
• 2:03
  calibrating against isn't your actual peers. It's a globally
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  curated selection of the most visually striking works from
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  millions of photographers, filtered and amplified by an
• 2:14
  algorithm specifically designed to maximize your engagement by
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  surfacing content that provokes a strong emotional response. You
• 2:22
  are comparing your complete output, including the misfires,
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  the experimental shots, the images you took while still
• 2:28
  figuring something out, to someone's absolute highlights,
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  their best work from their best shoots, often edited and
• 2:34
  presented with the full benefit of hindsight and curation. It is
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  structurally an unfair comparison, and your brain
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  doesn't naturally correct for that unfairness. It just
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  registers the gap and feels bad about it. Now, what's the
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  algorithm's role? It's worth being specific about what the
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  algorithm is actually doing here because it's not neutral.
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  Platforms like Instagram and TikTok use engagement metrics,
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  likes, comments, shares, time spent viewing, to determine what
• 3:00
  content to amplify content that provokes strong emotion,
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  including the slightly uncomfortable feeling of awe or
• 3:05
  envy when you see exceptional work, tends to generate more
• 3:08
  engagement than content that's merely pleasant. So the
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  algorithm actively surfaces the most extraordinary content
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  because extraordinary content keeps you on the platform
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  longer. The result is an environment where your feed is
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  not a representative sample of photography. It's the extreme
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  right tail of a distribution, the statistical outliers, the
• 3:29
  once in a career shots, the photographers who have years of
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  experience and resources you may not have access to, and you're
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  consuming it in rapid, continuous scroll that gives
• 3:41
  your brain no time to contextualize what it's seeing.
• 3:44
  It's not a conspiracy. It's just an optimization process, running
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  exactly as it was designed to. But knowing that it's happening
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  is the first step to not being consciously controlled by it.
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  Now let's talk about the gap and why it's actually good news. You
• 4:03
  see, in 2009 radio producer and broadcaster Ira Glass gave an
• 4:07
  interview that has been passed around creative communities ever
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  since because it articulates something that most experienced
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  creatives know intuitively, but rarely hear said out loud. Glass
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  was talking about what he called the gap, the distance between
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  your taste and your ability. He described it this way: the
• 4:27
  reason you got into creative work in the first place is
• 4:30
  because you have good taste, you can recognize exceptional work,
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  you have a sense of what quality looks like.
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  But in the early and middle stages of your development, your
• 4:39
  ability, your actual technical and creative execution hasn't
• 4:44
  caught up with that taste yet. You make something and you can
• 4:47
  tell it's not quite right, but you don't yet have the skills to
• 4:51
  make it right. And that gap, Glass argued, is the thing that
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  kills most creative people's momentum. They feel. The
• 5:00
  distance between what they're making and what they want to be
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  making, and they interpret that feeling as evidence that they
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  don't have what it takes. But the gap is not a sign that you
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  lack talent. It's a sign that your taste is working correctly.
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  You can only feel the gap if your taste is good enough to
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  recognize quality. Someone with no taste does not feel the gap.
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  They're perfectly happy with mediocre work because they can't
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  tell the difference. The implication there is
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  significant. That uncomfortable feeling when you look at your
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  work and know it isn't quite there yet is not discouragement.
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  It's calibration. It's your taste doing its job. And the
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  only way to close the gap is not to scroll more, not to study
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  more gear reviews, not to buy better equipment. It's to
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  produce a larger volume of work, to keep shooting, keep editing,
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  keep making things until your hands catch up with your eyes,
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  so to speak. When you frame the comparison feeling that way, not
• 6:02
  as evidence of inadequacy, but as evidence of a functioning
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  esthetic taste, it changes what the feeling means. It becomes
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  information rather than judgment. Let's talk about
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  curated consumption. Understanding the mechanism
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  doesn't make it stop, though. You can't just think your way
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  out of a psychological response that's been enforced by 1000s of
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  hours of scrolling. This is what I call curated consumption:
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  being intentional about what visual material you feed your
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  brain, rather than just letting the algorithm decide. The first
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  and most practical tool is the mute button. Most platforms let
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  you mute accounts without unfollowing them. The person
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  never knows. You don't have to make a social statement about
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  it, but their content stops appearing in your feed. This is
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  not about avoiding excellence. It's about being selective about
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  which excellence you're exposing yourself to and in what context.
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  If there's an account that consistently makes you feel
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  deflated rather than inspired, even if the work is objectively
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  extraordinary, muting it is a legitimate act of creative
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  self-preservation. The distinction to develop is
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  between accounts that make you ask, "How do they do that? and
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  accounts that make you feel like you're never good enough. You,
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  the first response, invokes curiosity and it's generative.
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  The second is comparison and it's corrosive. Both can be
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  triggered by the same exceptional image, but the
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  difference is often about your mental state when you encounter
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  it and how that particular photographer's esthetic and
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  approach relates to your own. Learn to notice which response
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  is happening and adjust your feed accordingly. The second
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  element of curated consumption is actively choosing to expose
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  yourself to work that exists outside the feedback loop of
• 7:54
  contemporary social media photography. Historical
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  photographers are particularly useful here, not because their
• 8:01
  work is better in some absolute sense, but because you can
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  engage with it purely on esthetic and technical terms,
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  without the noise of follower counts and like metrics. You're
• 8:13
  looking at the work, not the social proof surrounding it.
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  This is where we go to a lesson from Vivian Mayer. Vivian Mayer
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  is worth spending a moment on because her story contains
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  something important that gets lost in the way she's usually
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  discussed. Mayor was a nanny in Chicago who spent decades making
• 8:32
  extraordinary street photographs. She shot over
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  150,000 negatives across her lifetime. The vast majority of
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  them were never developed, never shown to anyone, never validated
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  by a single link or like or comment or exhibition. She died
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  in 2009 largely unknown. Her work was discovered by chance
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  when a local historian bought boxes of her negatives at an
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  auction and eventually had them developed and printed. The
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  photographs were revelatory. She's now considered one of the
• 9:04
  great street photographers of the 20th century. What strikes
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  me about Vivian isn't just the quality of her work; it's that
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  she made it entirely without external validation. She wasn't
• 9:18
  building an audience. She wasn't optimizing for engagement, she
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  wasn't developing a visual practice because the practice
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  itself mattered to her.
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  Any and over decades of practice, she developed a voice
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  so distinct and refined that it's immediately recognizable.
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  That's the version of photography that exists before
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  the comparison trap gets involved, work made for its own
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  sake, driven by genuine curiosity rather than social
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  feedback. It's harder to access that mode when you're posting
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  regularly and watching numbers, but it's worth remembering that
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  it is possible, and that historically it's produced some
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  of the most enduring work. The medium has ever seen. Okay, so
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  social comparison is not something you can eliminate.
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  It's wired into how human beings evaluate themselves and their
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  place in a community. But you can change the inputs: what
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  you're comparing yourself to, how you're interpreting the
• 10:17
  comparison feeling, and whether you're letting an algorithm make
• 10:21
  those decisions for you, or making them yourself. The gap
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  between your taste and your ability is not a verdict; it's a
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  distance to be closed one shoot at a time by making more work
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  rather than consuming more of other people's work. Okay, your
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  homework has two parts. First, go to your following list and
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  mute, not unfollow. Just mute any five accounts that
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  consistently leave you feeling discouraged rather than curious.
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  You can revisit the decision in a month. Second, find one
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  photographer from before the social media era whose work
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  genuinely moves you: Vivian Mayer, Ansel Adams, Winogrand,
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  Diane Arbus, Sebastio Salgado, whoever resonates, and spend 20
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  minutes looking at their work without reading any comments,
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  checking likes or follower counts, or scrolling past it.
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  Just look at it, notice what it does to your sense of what
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  photography is capable of, and then once you're finished with
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  that, go make something. Until next time, stay safe and stay
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  nerdy.