There is a moment in Spider-Man: Brand New Day where Peter Parker does something almost everyone has done.

He lies in bed and scrolls through his phone. He sees his friends living their lives without him. He watches people he cares about having experiences he wishes he could be part of, and almost immediately, he starts comparing what they have to what he doesn't.

It's one of the least superhero-like moments in the movie. And maybe one of the most relatable.

Because you don't need to be Peter Parker to know what it's like to open your phone feeling completely fine about your life and close it five minutes later wondering whether everyone else is doing better than you.

Comparison Can Make a Good Life Feel Bad

The strange thing about comparison is how quickly it can change the way you see your own life.

Nothing actually has to happen. You can have a job you like, good friends, things you're excited about, and a life you were perfectly happy with ten minutes ago. Then you open Instagram.

Someone got promoted. Someone is traveling. Someone moved into an amazing apartment. Someone got into a relationship. Someone is at a party you weren't invited to.

Suddenly, what you have doesn't feel as good anymore.

Peter experiences exactly that in Brand New Day.

"He's scrolling on his phone and seeing his friends doing stuff without him, stuff that he wishes he could do."

Nothing about Peter's life actually changes while he's scrolling. What changes is what he's comparing it to.

There's research behind that feeling too. The American Psychological Association's Psychology of Popular Media highlights research specifically examining the relationship between social comparison, social media, and self-esteem.

Comparison has the ability to change the way you evaluate something without changing the thing itself.

Including your own life.

Social Media Gives You Unlimited People to Compare Yourself To

Comparison obviously existed before social media.

But there used to be a limit to how many lives you could see. You compared yourself to your friends, classmates, coworkers, siblings, or maybe a celebrity you saw on television.

Now you can compare yourself to hundreds of people before you've even gotten out of bed.

And everyone is showing you something.

The new job. The vacation. The relationship. The night out. The apartment. The marathon. The engagement. The promotion.

You're seeing the moments people decided were worth sharing, then comparing them to the completely unedited version of your own life.

That's not exactly a fair comparison.

Pew Research Center's Teens' Views About Social Media found that 23% of teens said what they saw on social media made them feel at least a little worse about their own lives, while 31% said it made them feel like their friends were leaving them out of things.

Peter's experience captures how easy it is to fall into that trap.

"And just that feeling of jealousy and comparison and FOMO and everything that comes with social media."

Even Spider-Man isn't immune to it.

Feeling Behind Doesn't Mean You Actually Are

Comparison gets especially difficult as you get older because suddenly there are more things to compare.

When you're younger, most people around you are roughly doing the same thing. You're in school. You have similar schedules. Everyone is moving toward relatively similar milestones.

Then your 20s happen.

One friend goes to graduate school. Someone gets a huge job. Someone moves across the country. Someone gets engaged. Someone starts a company. Someone moves home. Someone has absolutely no idea what they're doing.

For the first time, everyone's timelines start looking completely different.

That's where How to Build Confidence When You Feel Behind in Life becomes so important. Feeling behind often isn't based on an objective measurement of where you're supposed to be. It's based on looking at somebody else's timeline and deciding yours should look more like theirs.

Peter does the same thing.

He sees his friends moving forward and wonders why his life can't look like theirs.

But somebody else being somewhere different doesn't automatically mean they're ahead.

It might just mean they're somewhere different.

You Never Have the Full Picture

One of the biggest problems with comparison is that you're almost always working with incomplete information.

You see somebody get promoted. You don't see the two years they spent hating their previous job.

You see the relationship. You don't see every difficult conversation.

You see the vacation. You don't see the ordinary Tuesday morning when they're stressed about work and doing laundry.

Meanwhile, you know everything about your own life.

You know what you're insecure about. You know what's going wrong. You know what you haven't accomplished yet. You know all the things you're still trying to figure out.

You're comparing the full version of yourself to a tiny piece of somebody else.

Pew Research Center's Teens' Social Media Habits and Experiences found that 43% of teens felt pressure to only post content that made them look good to others. That's an important reminder that the lives we're comparing ourselves to online aren't necessarily complete representations of those lives.

Peter sees what his friends are doing.

He doesn't necessarily see everything happening underneath it.

Neither do we.

Comparison Can Make You Ignore Your Own Progress

Another problem with constantly looking sideways is that you stop noticing how far you've actually come.

Maybe your career isn't where your friend's career is, but you're further along than you were a year ago. Maybe you're single while somebody else is in a relationship, but you've become much clearer about what you actually want from the next person you date.

Progress doesn't always look impressive enough to post.

Sometimes it's becoming more confident. Building a better routine. Getting better at your job. Becoming a better friend. Learning how to be alone. Putting yourself out there after being rejected.

That's part of what Why Confidence Comes After Action gets right. Confidence often comes from collecting evidence that you can do difficult things, not from reaching the same milestones as everybody around you.

Your progress still counts when nobody else sees it.

Someone Else's Success Doesn't Take Anything Away From You

This is easy to understand and much harder to actually believe.

Your friend's promotion doesn't make your career worse. Someone else's relationship doesn't make being single a failure. Someone buying an apartment doesn't mean you should own one. Someone accomplishing something at 24 doesn't mean you have to accomplish it by 24 too.

But comparison can turn somebody else's good news into evidence that something is missing from your life.

You stop being happy for them because their success suddenly feels like a judgment of you.

It isn't.

Someone else getting something you want proves that thing happened for them.

That's all.

Their life isn't a scoreboard for yours.

Sometimes You Need to Put the Phone Down

There is also a very practical lesson in Peter lying there scrolling.

Sometimes the answer isn't developing a revolutionary new mindset.

It's closing the app.

If you've been scrolling for 20 minutes and every post is making you feel worse about yourself, you don't have to keep going. The phone isn't giving you useful information anymore.

It's feeding the comparison.

Recent Pew Research Center data makes this especially interesting. Its 2025 report Social Media and Teens' Mental Health: What Teens and Their Parents Say found that 48% of teens believed social media had a mostly negative effect on people their age, up from 32% in 2022.

At the same time, teens were much less likely to say it negatively affected them personally, showing how complicated our relationship with social media can be.

That doesn't mean social media is inherently bad or that you need to delete every app. It means paying attention to how you're using it and how you feel afterward.

If following someone consistently makes you feel inadequate, you can mute them. If you always feel worse after scrolling at night, stop bringing your phone to bed.

You don't have to voluntarily consume something that repeatedly makes your own life feel worse.

Focus on the Life You Actually Want

There's another problem with comparison that doesn't get talked about enough.

Sometimes you start chasing things you don't actually want.

You see someone traveling constantly and think you should travel more. Someone starts a business and suddenly you wonder whether you should start one. Someone gets into a relationship and now you feel pressure to find one.

But do you actually want those things?

Or do you want them because someone else made them look good?

Comparison can make somebody else's definition of a good life become yours without you even noticing.

That's why You’re Not Supposed to Know Your Career Yet (Here’s How to Actually Figure It Out) is such an important question.

The goal isn't to build the life that looks most impressive when somebody else sees it.

It's to build the life you actually want to live.

Peter doesn't need his life to look like his friends' lives.

He needs to figure out what he wants his own to become.

You Can Feel Jealous Without Being a Bad Person

There's also nothing particularly unusual about seeing somebody else have something you want and feeling jealous.

Peter does.

Most of us do.

You can be happy for your friend and still wish you had what they have. Those feelings can exist at the same time.

The problem isn't having the thought.

It's what you do with it.

You can let jealousy turn into resentment, or you can use it as information. Sometimes jealousy tells you something about what you want.

If you're jealous of someone's career, maybe you want to take yours more seriously. If you're jealous of someone's social life, maybe you want to put more effort into your friendships.

Comparison becomes useful when it points you back toward your own life instead of keeping your attention on somebody else's.

And Here's The Thing

Spider-Man: Brand New Day doesn't show Peter comparing himself to some impossible superhero.

He compares himself to his friends.

That's what makes the scene work.

Most of the people we compare ourselves to aren't celebrities or billionaires. They're people close enough to us that we can imagine having what they have.

And that's exactly why comparison can hit so hard.

But Peter's life isn't worse because somebody else's looks different.

Neither is yours.

You can want more for yourself without deciding what you already have isn't enough. You can see somebody else's success without turning it into evidence of your failure. You can feel behind without actually being behind.

And sometimes you can just put the phone down.

Your life isn't happening on somebody else's screen.

It's happening right in front of you.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does Spider-Man: Brand New Day teach about comparison?

Comparing your life to someone else's can make you overlook what's already good about your own.

Why does social media make comparison worse?

It gives you constant access to curated moments from other people's lives while you see every part of your own.

Does feeling behind mean you are behind?

No. People follow different timelines, especially as careers and relationships begin moving in different directions.

Is jealousy always a bad thing?

No. Sometimes jealousy can help you identify something you genuinely want to work toward.

How do you stop comparing yourself to others?

Spend less time measuring your progress against other people's milestones and more time deciding what you actually want for yourself.