I write Not a Tech Wizard, Just a Coach, a monthly newsletter for coaches who are tired of duct-taping their backend systems or over-relying on corporate clients. It’s part tech tips, part workflow sanity, and part useless fun fact — because we all need a breather.I also run a private coaching practice for spoonies, helping them chase saner goals at their own pace, with energy and self-trust at the center.
🌀Comfort Vs Comparison
Published 17 days ago • 5 min read
Hello Friends,
Last week’s recurrent dialogue in my coaching sessions was, “I am comfortable where I am, I should be okay with it, but I am not.”
Discomfort is slowly and steadily brewing under the apparently comfortable life and career that my clients have on the surface. They earn well, they are respected in their roles, work in their dream companies and have steady personal lives. There is no obvious major crisis in their lives, but they are restless and wonder if they are too comfortable.
The key thing that seems to consistently trigger dissatisfaction with their perfect lives is comparison with peers.
Today, we’ll explore the dissatisfaction stemming from comparison triggered by LinkedIn scrolling and a perspective on how to embrace and work with it.
A coaching conversation is a great place to examine dissatisfaction brewing underneath.
I coach clients on topics related to work-life balance and transitions, workplace conflicts, office politics, and career growth and more. I often work with neurodivergent professionals who want to navigate work and life through small, sustainable shifts.
If you’d like to explore working together, book a 30-minute discovery call (free for now, and turns paid from 1st December 2025)
In that short, still pocket of time during the day, when nothing is demanded of you and you are bundled up with other humans in uncomfortably close physical contact, your hand moves almost on reflex. The phone comes out of the pocket, thumb opening the LinkedIn app before you realise what you are doing.
As the lift stops at every floor, you scroll through the feed, noting that someone who was in the induction training with you as an awkward fresher has just become ‘Head of Something Important’. Another has posted photographs from their keynote speech at a conference in your field which didn’t you even know was happening.
By the time the lift hits the ground floor, you are suddenly questioning a career and life that seemed perfectly fine 30 seconds ago. The discomfort simmers over multiple LinkedIn scrolls, and you idly wonder if getting laid off might ease this tension building up inside.
When THE scroll is not harmless
What seems like a harmless scroll in an empty moment is actually not random but designed to hook users onto the platform.
The Scroll
Studies on LinkedIn show that even brief, passive scrolling activates comparison circuits in the brain long before we realise it.
LinkedIn, unlike other platforms, concentrates achievement in a way that nudges us into comparison almost immediately.
This is not an anecdotal statement offered by ‘the anti-social media brigade’, but something that recent research has been tracking closely.
Recent research shows that LinkedIn is a potent breeding ground for comparison, because almost every post highlights a milestone (a promotion, a certification, a new role, a move abroad, a new win), triumph over hardship (bounce back after illness, critical life event, layoff, bereavement) or words of wisdom (that often lead us to attribute the wisdom and learning to the person who posted it instead of the person who has actually experienced it).
Research from Erasmus University found that people actively compare themselves to others as seen on LinkedIn, and this shapes their confidence and anxiety around career decisions. Other work shows that LinkedIn’s design and preset messages like “Congrats on your promotion” and celebratory icons increase performance pressure and comparison tendencies even during short, passive scrolling sessions.
I could go on and on, quoting numerous studies that are emerging in this space that note how the platform is designed to make upward comparison intentional and automatic.
What is the trigger releasing?
LinkedIn is trigger-happy, and it sets off whenever we scroll into it. But the question is, what is the trigger releasing? What is preloaded that is being set off?
When there are strong associations of identity and self-worth with one’s job, money and status, this trigger is released automatically when we come across posts from others on a platform like LinkedIn.
When we are dissatisfied with our worthiness and think we have not realised our potential for various reasons, LinkedIn becomes a minefield where any post could trigger and increase the intensity of these thoughts and emotions.
When your identity and worthiness are tied to what you should be doing (or what others expect), such comparisons amplify stress or anxiety, which shows up as thoughts like ‘I had a few years of career break, and I started later than them’, ‘I should have moved faster’, ‘At this rate, I will be this sad person in my 40s who everyone knows has hit the ceiling and is not capable of going any further’, ‘I am better than them; if they could get a role in that company, I will apply too.’
All of us
No one is immune to these comparisons
No matter how sorted you are in life, no one is immune to such comparisons. I am yet to meet anyone who doesn’t have self-doubts, insecurities, and anxiety about where they are in life and the gap between here and where they ought to be.
So even if you delete your account on LinkedIn or other social media platforms, it just quietens the comparison tendencies for a while (if you are especially prone to it), and it rears its head in other situations.
Here are three perspectives on how to work with this.
Block LinkedIn
If you are prone to comparisons and the associated anxiety and stress, and if your life is at maximum capacity with these emotions, block LinkedIn (using a hard app blocker) for a period of 30 days and notice the quality of your emotional life.
How did these 30 days of not automatically comparing your life with others feel?
Create Friction
You may decide that you want to be on LinkedIn for various reasons, and that is perfectly fine. So here’s a way to buffer yourself from automatic comparisons.
Engage intentionally.
Instead of doomscrolling mindlessly, engage with the posts that you are reading beyond an emoticon reaction or using preset messages (not even ChatGPT, Perplexity or any other AI).
Write a thoughtful note that conveys your sincerity in wishing well for the other person. Write a comment that expresses how you feel about the post you have just read.
Engage and connect with the humans behind the feed.
Do this for a week, and notice how this experience is for you.
This is harder than it looks, and it is worth a trial if you would like to not quit LinkedIn but use it mindfully.
Explore the Identity Attachment
Work with a professional (a therapist or a coach) to explore this attachment of your identity to doing. Find out how willing you are to slowly relinquish and detach the hold of your identity to doing, and how you can accept yourself the way you are.
This is the inner work that is transformative and will help you to relinquish the hold of comparisons that steal your satisfaction.
As of now, I don’t spend any time on LinkedIn. I have been told several times by well-meaning folks that I have to be on LinkedIn. I regularly get LinkedIn posts from peers about how well others are showcasing themselves on LinkedIn. But I don’t open such links.
I conducted an experiment where I posted on LinkedIn and engaged for 6 weeks, and those weeks were the worst for my peace of mind and satisfaction. For me, it is not worth sacrificing my inner state for “professional visibility” as I slowly build my coaching practice.
Siri’s Pick
I read this book in 2019, as I was trying to understand why I was getting hooked on social media (Facebook was my social media drug of choice then).
It opened my eyes to design choices that people who build these apps make and how so many thousands of engineers are sitting on the other side making a determined grab for my attention.
It helped me start crafting strategies that would help me relinquish my hold on these platforms. I am no longer on Facebook, am barely active on LinkedIn, enjoy my 10 minutes a day on Instagram, and there is enough time to read, to cook and to just be.
🎯 Coach | 💻 Tech Simplifier | 💬 Creator of Not a Tech Wizard, Just a Coach
I write Not a Tech Wizard, Just a Coach, a monthly newsletter for coaches who are tired of duct-taping their backend systems or over-relying on corporate clients. It’s part tech tips, part workflow sanity, and part useless fun fact — because we all need a breather.I also run a private coaching practice for spoonies, helping them chase saner goals at their own pace, with energy and self-trust at the center.
