The Comparison Trap Behind Career and Life Decisions

WRITTEN BY ALICIA KOCH, FOUNDER OF THE LEGAL BELLETRIST 

We all know the person. On Tuesday, they’re a corporate lawyer. By Friday, they’re announcing a “new chapter” from a tastefully exposed-brick office, having apparently converted doubt into a consultancy, a podcast and excellent natural light. They make the whole thing look as clean as a partner deleting an inconvenient clause. Lucky buggers.

And then there’s the rest of us. We’ve spent four months wondering whether to update a LinkedIn headline. We’ve researched courses, modelled cash flow, asked nine people what they think and built a risk matrix elaborate enough to qualify for public procurement. Meanwhile, the other person still looks clear, brave and decisive. So, we quietly conclude that change must somehow be easier for them.

It feels like evidence. But it isn’t. We’re comparing our private negotiations with somebody else’s public statement. I’ve done it too, and I’ve yet to meet a senior professional who hasn’t. The issue here isn’t fear of change. Fear may be in the room, drinking bad coffee and billing by the hour, but it isn’t the whole story. The real problem is how confidently we misread other people’s clarity while treating our own ambivalence as a character flaw.

Social Comparison Makes Everyone Else’s Career Change Look Neater

In 1954, psychologist Leon Festinger proposed that people evaluate their opinions and abilities by comparing themselves with others, particularly when objective standards are unavailable. A career transition is almost offensively short of objective standards. There’s no universally accepted unit of “right move”, no precedent that binds the future and no judge willing to issue declaratory relief on whether leaving equity partnership to open a ceramics studio is commercially sensible. So, we look sideways. Festinger’s A Theory of Social Comparison Processes explains why.

The comparison’s rigged from the start. We see the outcome, not the drafts. We see the resignation, not the 18 months of bargaining, backing away and staring into the fridge as if the yoghurt might offer strategic direction. We see the new role, not the rejected applications, strained conversations and emergency arithmetic. Then we hold that polished portrait against our own backstage footage and wonder why we look sweaty.

Social media makes this worse with admirable efficiency. A 2021 study of Japanese employees found that positive career posts could trigger career frustration by encouraging upward social comparison. However, ordinary, informal conversations with others helped to reduce that frustration. In other words, Fukubayashi and Fuji’s research suggests that your feed can make everyone else’s career look triumphant, while a real conversation may reveal that triumph is mostly admin under flattering light.

LinkedIn Is a Comparison Machine Wearing a Lanyard

LinkedIn isn’t lying, exactly. That would be legally actionable and far less interesting. It’s curating. It presents the promotion, not the politics; the founder photograph, not the overdraft; the courageous pivot, not the Sunday-night nausea. It’s a professional networking platform in the same way a casino is an interior-design concept – technically accurate and yet, spiritually evasive.

A recent peer-reviewed study of 188 LinkedIn users found that heavier use was associated with more career comparison, a greater sense of falling short of one’s goals and a stronger urge to revise them. The authors didn’t prove that LinkedIn causes an existential collapse before breakfast. But Vogt and colleagues’ 2026 study does show what happens when a stream of visible achievement becomes a measuring device. The problem is that it’s calibrated against edited lives.

This lands particularly hard for senior professionals because we’ve been trained to treat ambiguity as a defect. Lawyers produce opinions. CEOs produce decisions. Clinicians produce formulations. Nobody pays premium rates to hear, “Honestly, I’m not sure, and the whole thing’s a bit weird”. But change rattle’s identity, income, status, competence and belonging. Of course, the evidence we’re weighing in our own minds is complicated and often contradictory. Mine has been. Yours probably has too. What’s odd isn’t that we’re uncertain. It’s that anyone’s managed to monetise the appearance of never being uncertain.

The Spotlight Effect Turns Private Doubt Into Imagined Public Theatre

Then there’s the spotlight effect – our tendency to overestimate how much other people notice and evaluate our behaviour. Gilovich, Medvec and Savitsky demonstrated it across several studies, including experiments in which participants overestimated how many observers noticed their T-shirts. Their Journal of Personality and Social Psychology paper is a useful corrective to the belief that the entire profession is tracking your hesitant pivot in real time.

Here’s the less glamorous truth – your former colleagues probably aren’t convening a special committee to discuss your revised biography. They’re thinking about their matters, margins, children, blood pressure and whether anyone noticed they said “strategic lens” three times in one meeting. Your transition is understandably enormous to you. To almost everyone else, it’s one item glimpsed between calendar invitations.

The related illusion of transparency makes us believe our internal states are more visible than they are. Research reviewed by Gilovich and Savitsky found that people overestimate how much nervousness, alarm or discomfort “leaks out”. This creates a peculiar double error – you assume your doubt is obvious while assuming everyone else’s doubt is absent. It’s an excellent arrangement if your goal is to feel uniquely defective using no reliable evidence whatsoever.

Pluralistic Ignorance: Everyone Thinks Everyone Else Is Certain

Sometimes the illusion becomes collective. Pluralistic ignorance occurs when group members systematically misjudge one another’s private attitudes or feelings. As Dale Miller’s 2023 review neatly puts it, a group can become confidently mistaken about itself. Everyone has doubts; everyone hides them; everyone interprets everyone else’s concealment as certainty. Voilà: a culture of apparently fearless professionals privately Googling “Is 47 too late to start again?” arises.

This isn’t merely an amusing academic parlour trick. A 2024 study of occupational choice among PhD students and advisers found mismatches between what students thought advisers preferred and what advisers actually supported. Crucially, making support for diverse career options explicit reduced discomfort. The context was academia, but Leong, Hegarty and Sherman’s findings travel well. Silence permits imagined norms to acquire the authority of policy.

I’ve watched this happen in rooms full of clever, accomplished people. One senior executive assumes that “serious people” don’t build portfolio careers, while 4 equally serious people on the same floor are privately considering exactly that and saying nothing. Nobody wants to be the first to admit the old plan no longer fits. The legal profession is especially gifted at this. It can turn mass uncertainty into a formal dress code.

Why Other People’s Decisiveness Is Often Retrospective Editing

Once a decision works, we tidy the story. We give it a beginning, a middle and, if somebody’s got a conference budget, a tasteful keynote slide. The person who changed direction says they “just knew”. Perhaps they did. More often, the knowing arrived after awkward experiments, conversations that went nowhere, false starts and enough practical evidence to make the next step bearable.

Herminia Ibarra’s work on career reinvention argues that transition isn’t a straight route towards a predetermined identity. It’s an iterative business – trying out possible selves, entering new networks and making sense of what emerges. Her updated Working Identity rejects the comforting fiction that perfect clarity must come before action. Often, we know because we’ve started doing. It’s less cinematic than a leap of faith, but vastly more useful and usually kinder to the mortgage.

The apparently decisive person may simply be further along in the evidence-gathering process. Or they may be reckless. Confidence and competence have never been reliably monogamous. What you’re seeing is a behaviour, not a complete psychological audit.

Your Uncertainty Isn’t Proof That You’re Behind

Uncertainty feels meaningful because it’s loud. Research shows that people who struggle more with uncertainty tend to experience stronger negative states and weaker positive ones. A 2023 community study by Morriss and colleagues found these effects even after controlling for general distress, anxious arousal and anhedonic depression (depression that makes it difficult to feel pleasure or interest). More recently, an experimental study found that increasing intolerance of uncertainty increased indecisiveness across personally relevant decisions. Appel and Gerlach’s 2025 findings matter because they distinguish an aversive response to not knowing from evidence that the decision itself is wrong.

Please don’t turn this into another reason to diagnose yourself over lunch. I’m not suggesting every delay is a disorder, or that every career change is secretly wise. Some are expensive nervous breakdowns wearing brand photography. My point’s far less dramatic – the noise in your head doesn’t tell you how brave you are compared with someone else. It tells you that you’re the one living with the consequences. They are, rather inconveniently, personal.

How to Stop Comparing Your Messy Middle With Someone Else’s Announcement

Start by comparing process with process. Ask the person who changed what happened before the announcement. How long did they sit with it? What went wrong? What did it cost? Which part still feels unresolved? Once the polished version has left the room, most people will tell you more than you’d expect. Ask for the disclosure schedule, not the glossy transaction summary.

Next, separate what you can actually see from what you’ve invented. “She resigned” is a fact. “She was certain” is an inference. “He launched a business” is a fact. “He’s braver than I am” is an autobiography you’ve written about yourself using somebody else’s logo.

Then shrink the imaginary courtroom. Decide whose judgement genuinely matters. Your partner, financial adviser, therapist, coach or mentor may deserve a seat. The former colleague who reacts to every promotion with “Well deserved!” probably doesn’t need to be subpoenaed.

Try something small before you make the grand announcement. Teach one workshop. Shadow one role. Take on one different client. Speak to 3 people who already do the work. This is where Ibarra’s approach becomes useful rather than merely interesting – action can give you information without requiring you to detonate your income for dramatic effect.

Keep a decision ledger too. Nothing grand. Write down what you know, what you’re assuming, what still needs testing and what “good enough” evidence would look like. Executives do this for capital allocation. Lawyers do it for disputed facts. We can probably extend ourselves the same courtesy, particularly when the alternative is giving a malfunctioning photocopier more disciplined thought than our own lives.

Change Doesn’t Look Easy From the Inside – for Anyone!

Other people aren’t necessarily clearer, braver or more decisive. We’re simply catching them at a different point in the story. We see the crossing, not the pacing at the edge. We hear the final answer, not the internal appeal court. And, because we’re human, we fill the missing pages with flattering assumptions about them and rather less generous ones about ourselves.

Comparison can still be useful though, but only when it gives us information rather than a verdict. Let somebody else’s move remind you that options exist. Don’t let their polished certainty become proof that you’re failing. I know how quickly the mind can turn incomplete data into a hostile expert report. It’s persuasive, detailed and often wrong. We don’t have to admit it without question.

A More Honest Next Step

If you’re considering a life or career change, don’t ask whether you look as certain as the person online. Ask what you need to know before taking the next sensible step. Then have one honest conversation with someone who’ll examine the comparison with you, rather than applaud it or prosecute it. Braving Boundaries supports individuals and teams navigating change through practical, down-to-earth coaching and training. You don’t need a grand reinvention speech. But you may need a better question, a smaller experiment and fewer professional strangers living in your head rent-free.

(Sources used and to whom we owe thanks: Leon Festinger, “A Theory of Social Comparison Processes”, Human Relations (1954), DOI: 10.1177/001872675400700202; Thomas Gilovich, Victoria Husted Medvec and Kenneth Savitsky, “The Spotlight Effect in Social Judgment: An Egocentric Bias in Estimates of the Salience of One’s Own Actions and Appearance”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2000), DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.78.2.211; Thomas Gilovich and Kenneth Savitsky, “The Spotlight Effect and the Illusion of Transparency: Egocentric Assessments of How We Are Seen by Others”, Current Directions in Psychological Science (1999), DOI: 10.1111/1467-8721.00039; Dale T. Miller, “A Century of Pluralistic Ignorance: What We Have Learned About Its Origins, Forms, and Consequences”, Frontiers in Social Psychology (2023), DOI: 10.3389/frsps.2023.1260896; Suyi Leong, Mary Hegarty and David K. Sherman, “Pluralistic Ignorance and Occupational Choice: The Impact of Communicating Norms on Graduate Students’ Career Aspirations”, Journal of Applied Social Psychology (2024), DOI: 10.1111/jasp.13028; Nao Fukubayashi and Kei Fuji, “Social Comparison on Social Media Increases Career Frustration: A Focus on the Mitigating Effect of Companionship”, Frontiers in Psychology (2021), DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.720960; Maria Vogt, Elke Rohmann, Hans-Werner Bierhoff and Phillip Ozimek, “Revising Career Goals on LinkedIn: The Role of Career-Related Social Comparison and Goal Discrepancy”, Behavioral Sciences (2026), DOI: 10.3390/bs16081271; Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity, Updated Edition, With a New Preface: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career, Harvard Business Review Press (2023); Jayne Morriss, Kimberly Goh, Colette R. Hirsch and Helen F. Dodd, “Intolerance of Uncertainty Heightens Negative Emotional States and Dampens Positive Emotional States”, Frontiers in Psychiatry (2023), DOI: 10.3389/fpsyt.2023.1147970; Helmut Appel and Alexander L. Gerlach, “Intolerance of Uncertainty Causally Affects Indecisiveness”, British Journal of Clinical Psychology (2025), DOI: 10.1111/bjc.12534; and Braving Boundaries).