Why do I compare myself to everyone?

It’s 11pm. You’re scrolling LinkedIn in bed. Someone you sat next to in school, who once ate a glue stick for a bet, is now “Head of Global Strategy.” He’s twenty-nine. You’re eating cereal out of a mug, because all the bowls are dirty.

Instagram. An engagement. Then another engagement. Then a gender reveal, a house purchase and a “so grateful for this journey” post from a beach in Bali. You’re genuinely happy for all of them. You also open your own camera roll to see what your last photo was. It’s a screenshot of a parking ticket.

At the gym, the person next to you is lifting twice what you’re lifting. You quietly add more weight. You will regret this tomorrow.

Your friend posts her Sunday run on Strava: 15 kilometres, beautiful pace, sunrise photo. Your Sunday activity: walked to the shop for crisps. Technically cardio.

Two siblings, one birthday cake. They are not eating yet. They are measuring the slices. With a ruler. And somebody is already crying, because hers is two millimetres smaller.

And then there’s that list in your head. The one titled “By thirty, I should have…” You never actually wrote it. But somehow you know every item on it, and how many you haven’t ticked.

But here’s something weird. You never compare yourself to Taylor Swift’s bank account. You don’t lie awake jealous of the King of Spain. It’s always the person from school. The friend from work. Your cousin. Your sister’s slightly bigger slice.

Why? Why do we compare ourselves to everyone, and why always to the people closest to us?

A Viennese doctor who walked out on Freud said that feeling “less than” is where every human life begins. And an English philosopher with a pipe said that envy has a very short range, and he had a brilliant line about beggars to prove it.

You know the stereotype. A short man who’s aggressive, bossy and desperate to prove himself, supposedly to make up for his height. It’s called the “Napoleon complex,” named after Napoleon Bonaparte, the tiny, furious French emperor who tried to conquer Europe to compensate for being small.

One problem. Napoleon wasn’t small.

When he died, his height was recorded as five feet two inches. But in French feet and inches, which were longer than English ones. Converted properly, he was about one metre sixty-eight or sixty-nine, around five foot six or seven. For a Frenchman of his time, that was average, maybe even a little above.

So how did he end up as history’s most famous short man? Three things.

First, the British. During the wars, a British cartoonist called James Gillray drew Napoleon again and again as a tiny, screaming, tantrum-throwing little man, nicknamed “Little Boney.” The cartoons were hugely popular. Two hundred years later, the propaganda is still working. Never underestimate a cartoonist with a grudge.

Second, his nickname. His soldiers called him le petit caporal, “the little corporal.” But it was an affectionate nickname, about his closeness to ordinary soldiers, not his height. Like calling your friend “little man” when he’s six foot four.

Third, his bodyguards. The soldiers of his Imperial Guard had to meet a minimum height requirement. So in most pictures and public appearances, he was surrounded by very tall men. Stand anyone in the middle of a basketball team and they’ll look short.

So the “Napoleon complex” is named after a man who didn’t have the height problem, and maybe not the complex either. And the research on whether shorter men really are more aggressive? It’s mixed, and nowhere near as clear as the stereotype.

But there’s a second crime here. The “Napoleon complex” is often linked to an idea from our next guest, Alfred Adler: the idea that people who feel inferior in one area try extra hard to compensate in another. And Adler’s idea was real, important and much more interesting than a joke about short men. In fact, he thought everybody starts life feeling small.

Which, if you’ve ever been a baby, you did.

Meet Alfred Adler. Born near Vienna in 1870. As a small boy, he was sick all the time. He had rickets, a bone disease, and couldn’t walk properly until he was about four. At five, he nearly died of pneumonia. He watched other kids running and playing while he sat on the side, feeling clumsy, weak and behind.

And, I promise this is real, the older brother he always felt overshadowed by, the healthy, successful, golden boy of the family, was called… Sigmund.

So Alfred Adler grew up in the shadow of one Sigmund, and then spent his early career in the shadow of another one. If anyone was going to invent a theory about feeling small, it was this man.

Adler became a doctor, and in 1902 he was one of the very first people Freud invited to his Wednesday evening discussion group, the little circle that became the psychoanalytic movement. For a while, Adler was a star. He even became president of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. But he didn’t agree that sex was at the root of everything. He thought power was. Feeling strong or weak, big or small, important or unimportant.

In 1911, he walked out, along with several others. He called his new group the “Society for Free Psychoanalytic Research,” which Freud took, correctly, as an insult. Eventually he renamed his approach Individual Psychology.

So what was the big idea?

Adler started with bodies. He noticed that people with a physical weakness often worked incredibly hard to compensate for it, sometimes so hard they became exceptional. The classic example is an ancient one: the Greek orator Demosthenes, who, according to legend, had a stammer, and trained himself by practising speeches with pebbles in his mouth and shouting over the sound of the sea, until he became the greatest speaker in Athens.

Then Adler went bigger. Forget specific weaknesses, he said. Every human starts life feeling inferior. Think about it: you begin as a tiny, helpless person in a world of giants. Everyone is taller, stronger, cleverer, and in charge. You can’t reach the door handle, you can’t tie your shoes, nobody listens to your opinion on bedtime. Feeling small isn’t a problem some people have. It’s where all of us start.

And that feeling, he said, is the engine of a human life. We spend our lives striving: trying to overcome it, to become capable, significant, someone who matters. Each person develops their own unique way of doing that, which Adler called their style of life.

Most of the time, this is healthy. Feeling a bit behind is what makes you learn, practise and grow.

But sometimes it goes wrong in one of two ways.

The feeling of being “less than” becomes so overwhelming that you give up before you start: “I’m just not good at this, why bother.” That’s the inferiority complex.

Or you hide the feeling under a big show of confidence: loud, bossy, always needing to win, always needing everyone to know you’re winning. That’s the superiority complex. And notice: Adler would say the person who constantly needs to prove they’re better is usually the one who feels smallest inside. That’s what people actually mean by the “Napoleon complex,” minus the bit about height.

Adler is also the reason everyone has opinions about birth order. He said the firstborn gets “dethroned” when a sibling arrives, the middle child fights for attention, and the youngest is spoiled. Every family argument about “you’re such a typical oldest child” goes back to him. The honest update: large modern studies have found that birth order has very little effect on personality. So, sorry, it’s probably not because you’re the middle child.

But Adler’s final idea was his most beautiful. He said the answer to feeling inferior isn’t to become superior to everyone. It’s what he called social interest: a sense of belonging and caring about other people, and contributing to something bigger than yourself. The goal isn’t to be better than others. It’s to be useful with others.

The Freud rivalry never ended, by the way. Adler became hugely popular, especially in America, and died suddenly in 1937 while on a lecture tour in Aberdeen, Scotland. Freud’s reaction, in a private letter, was so snobbish it’s almost funny: roughly, that dying in Aberdeen was quite a career for a boy from the Viennese suburbs. Even at the end, Freud couldn’t resist one last comparison.

Meet Bertrand Russell. Born in 1872, died in 1970, at ninety-seven. His grandfather had been Prime Minister of Britain. He was orphaned young and raised by a strict grandmother in a big, quiet house. He grew up to become one of the most important philosophers and mathematicians of the twentieth century.

Some highlights.

He co-wrote a gigantic book trying to build the whole of mathematics from pure logic. It’s so thorough that the proof that one plus one equals two doesn’t arrive until hundreds of pages in. And when it finally does, the authors add a dry little comment that the result is “occasionally useful.” That’s the British sense of humour, in maths form.

He went to prison twice. The first time in 1918, for writing against the First World War. He used the six months to write a book. The second time in 1961, at the age of eighty-nine, for a protest against nuclear weapons. Most people slow down at eighty-nine. Russell got arrested.

He won the Nobel Prize in Literature, married four times, and smoked a pipe constantly. In 1948, he survived a plane crash into the sea in Norway, and he liked to say he’d survived because he’d chosen a seat in the smoking section. Please do not take health advice from philosophers.

And in 1930, he wrote a book called The Conquest of Happiness, which is basically a very clever, very funny self-help book, decades before self-help existed. It has a whole chapter on envy. And this is the line that earns him his place in this chapter:

Beggars do not envy millionaires.

He goes on to say that, of course, beggars do envy other beggars who are doing a little better than they are.

That’s it. That’s the whole mystery from the beginning of this chapter, solved in one sentence. You don’t envy Taylor Swift’s money or the King of Spain. They’re too far away to count. You envy the guy who ate a glue stick in school and is now Head of Global Strategy. Envy has a very short range. It only fires at people who are close enough that you feel you could have been them.

And Russell had an even better example, and it connects straight back to Napoleon. Napoleon, he wrote, envied Julius Caesar. Caesar envied Alexander the Great. And Alexander, the man who conquered most of the known world, envied Hercules, who never existed.

So even if you become the most powerful person on the planet, there’s always someone to compare yourself to. Even if you have to make them up.

Russell thought envy was one of the most universal and miserable human feelings. It doesn’t just make you unhappy about what you don’t have. It ruins what you do have, because you’re too busy looking at someone else’s to enjoy yours. You’re having a lovely Sunday walk to the shop for crisps, and then you see the 15-kilometre sunrise run on Strava, and suddenly your lovely walk is a failure.

His advice was simple, and surprisingly hard. When something good happens to you, enjoy it fully. Don’t immediately start comparing it to what someone else has. He also suggested that we should try to grow admiration in ourselves, and shrink envy. Admiration says: how wonderful that someone can do that. Envy says: why them and not me? Same situation, completely different feeling.

And one more thing. Russell knew that some envy points to real unfairness in the world. But he warned that comparing yourself to others is a game you can never win. There will always be someone with a bigger slice of cake. And if not, you’ll invent one. Ask Alexander.

Tonight: the man who invented the inferiority complex, versus the man who took hundreds of pages to prove that one plus one equals two.

So who wins?

No winner, but three practical tricks you can use tonight while scrolling.

First, Russell’s trick: when you feel envy, try turning it into admiration, or even curiosity. Not “why them and not me?” but “how did they do that?” One of those questions makes you bitter. The other might teach you something.

Second, Adler’s trick: compare yourself to who you were, not to who someone else is. The only race you’re actually in is with your past self. And you’re probably further ahead than you think.

Third, from both of them: remember that the person you’re comparing yourself to is almost certainly comparing themselves to someone else. The Head of Global Strategy is looking at someone’s Head of Global Strategy and Founder. Alexander the Great envied Hercules. Nobody, ever, has the biggest slice of cake.

And if it all gets too much? You’re allowed to mute the glue-stick guy.

The misquotes: Napoleon Bonaparte was not unusually short. His height at death was recorded as 5 pieds 2 pouces in French units, about 168–169 cm, average or slightly above for French men of his era. His reputation for shortness owes much to British caricatures, notably by James Gillray, to the affectionate nickname le petit caporal, and to the tall soldiers of his Imperial Guard. The term “Napoleon complex” was popularised in the twentieth century and is loosely linked to Adler’s ideas about compensation; Adler did not coin it, and research on height and aggression is mixed. The popular story that Salieri hated and poisoned Mozart has no reliable historical basis.

Alfred Adler (1870–1937): Austrian physician and founder of Individual Psychology. An early member of Freud’s circle and president of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1910, he broke with Freud in 1911, rejecting the central role of sexuality in favour of feelings of power, inferiority and the drive to overcome them.

Adler’s key ideas:

• Organ inferiority and compensation: physical weaknesses can lead to compensatory effort, sometimes overcompensation (Study of Organ Inferiority, 1907).
• Inferiority feeling: all humans begin life small and dependent, and the resulting sense of inferiority is universal and normal.
• Striving: life is shaped by the effort to overcome inferiority and achieve significance, guided by a personal goal and a characteristic style of life.
• Inferiority complex and superiority complex: when inferiority feelings become overwhelming, a person may give up (inferiority complex) or mask them with exaggerated displays of power and confidence (superiority complex).
• Birth order: Adler suggested that a child’s position in the family shapes personality. Large modern studies have found little or no effect of birth order on personality traits.
• Social interest (Gemeinschaftsgefühl): a sense of belonging and concern for others, which Adler considered the mark of psychological health.

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970): British philosopher, logician and social critic, co-author with Alfred North Whitehead of Principia Mathematica (1910–13), and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950. He was imprisoned for his anti-war activism in 1918 and briefly, aged 89, for anti-nuclear protest in 1961.

Russell on envy: In The Conquest of Happiness (1930), Russell described envy as one of the most universal and harmful human passions. He observed that envy is directed at those close to us in situation, not at the very distant (“beggars do not envy millionaires,” though they envy more successful beggars), and that it has no natural limit: Napoleon envied Caesar, Caesar envied Alexander, and Alexander envied Hercules, who never existed. He recommended enjoying one’s own pleasures without comparison, and cultivating admiration in place of envy.

Where they meet: Both see comparison with others as a pervasive feature of human life, and both reject the idea that happiness lies in becoming superior to others.

Where they differ: Adler sees comparison and feelings of inferiority as a natural engine of growth that becomes harmful only when exaggerated; his remedy is healthy striving and social interest. Russell treats envy as largely destructive of happiness; his remedy is to stop measuring one’s life against others and to replace envy with admiration.

Further reading:

• Adler’s Understanding Human Nature (1927), written for a general audience.
• Russell’s The Conquest of Happiness (1930), especially the chapters on envy and on competition. Witty, short and surprisingly modern.
• The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga, a bestselling dialogue that introduces Adler’s ideas.
• Bertrand Russell: A Very Short Introduction by A. C. Grayling.