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I’ve been touring colleges with my 17-year-old daughter, across our home state of Colorado and up and down the California coast. Recently, my daughter found a college she loves, nothing grand, a small liberal arts school, and when she pictures herself there, she smiles because it feels like her. But I’ve noticed something. When she imagines sharing her discovery with classmates, she hesitates, worried about what they might think: Your chosen school doesn’t boast a famous name. It’s not even well-known. They’ll say it without words, and her choice will feel like a lesser one, and somehow, she’ll feel less about herself too.
My daughter’s doing what we all do: measuring the worth of her decisions, and even her own worth, through comparison. And she’s dreading what we all dread: that sinking feeling of shame that arrives the moment we sense someone’s seeing us as less than (diminishing or devaluing us).
These feelings of shame are so pervasive in modern culture that I see them every day in almost every client who sits down across from me. And it’s getting worse. Where did it come from, and why is it spreading so fast?
A Stick to Measure Ourselves
To understand where shame comes from. Look no further than the two engines that drive consumer culture: acquiring and achieving. Almost from the crib, advertisers teach us that having more (the right toys, the right snacks, the right clothes) will bring people near and, impressed by what we have, they’ll see and value us. Then school arrives, and in our classrooms we learn that doing more (better grades, higher rankings, bigger awards) earns people’s praise and gets them to view us as worthy (Butler, 2021).
Before long, these become the measuring sticks we use to value ourselves: Our worth is defined by what we have and by what we do; it’s a worth that’s moved outside of ourselves.
Then off we go, measuring what we own against what others own, measuring what we do against what others do, believing this will tell us how much we’re worth. Psychologists call this social comparison, and it’s a game we can’t win.
Our endless comparing leads, inevitably, to a shame that flows in two directions. Look at someone who has more or does more, and we feel diminished: more than envious, we feel smaller and less valuable (Lei et al., 2026). Look at someone who has less or does less, and we feel a flicker of something uncomfortable, a sense that the other person is worth a little less, a shame that points outward (Boecker et al., 2022).
Then along comes an amplifier.
“Every Day Is a High School Reunion”
Consumer culture creates the conditions for social comparison, but the attention economy (social media, 24/7 news, algorithmic feeds) puts it into overdrive.
For much of the last hundred years, comparison was occasional. It was our neighbor cooking burgers on their shiny new outdoor barbecue or a colleague at a meeting carrying their new leather briefcase. But social media takes this to a whole new level, feeding comparisons to us at a rate we’ve never known, until they pour through our phones all day, every day (Verduyn et al., 2020). A landmark study in 2021 gave words to this experience: Social media is making “every day a high school reunion” (Midgley et al., 2021).
And social media is breeding a new kind of shame, a cruel shame. We know people post their best selves (flattering photos, proudest achievements, enviable vacations) in the hope of being seen and valued. Even so, we can’t help but feel the distance between our ordinary lives and the posters’ curated ones. Even the person posting feels this distance, a gap between the life they’re living and the one they’re putting on display. Everyone loses, and all the while a shame machine keeps running at full tilt. (And the research tells us it’s the youngest among us who lose the most.)
It was never supposed to be this way.
The Way It Was Is the Way Back
For 2 million years, we lived an entirely different life, in small villages of 30 to 100. There was no private property, no one accumulating. Instead, the belongings that came into the village were shared through what anthropologists call demand sharing: anyone could ask a fellow villager for what they needed, and it was given freely, because everything was understood as belonging to everyone. There was nothing to compare since everything was “ours.” Life, instead, was built on cooperative bonds, mutual aid, and a steady investment in each other (Lewis et al., 2014; Gilbert, 2021).
If the engines of consumer culture are acquiring and achieving, the engines of village culture are stillness (long, unhurried hours in the company of familiar faces) and compassion (room for each other, worth measured by presence rather than performance) (Gilbert, 2014). We were built for this way of life, and we still are.
It’s time we return to village culture by changing the engine that drives us. We begin by seeing shame for what it is. Yes, shame feels personal, like there’s something wrong with us, but let’s remember it’s cultural and comes from consumer culture handing us a measuring stick and teaching us to use it on ourselves. Listen: Don’t for a moment believe what shame tells you about yourself, because you are not the problem, and you never were.
Next, get out there, away from the scrolls that drive endless comparison and into the small circles of people on pickleball courts, in knitting groups, and in book clubs. We need to be around each other more. Once we’re there, practice the lost art of lingering (a form of stillness): Slow down, don’t hurry off when the paddles are racked and the knitting needles are set down, and see what unfolds in slow time with one another.
The more time we spend together, hearts open, finding the people who want to linger alongside us, the less our worth is counted in having and doing… and the more shame loosens its grip. In time, our worth stops being measured and becomes something given freely by the people who see us in the present moment and are genuinely glad to be with us. That’s when we understand what the village knew: Our worth is never found in comparison, only in cooperation.
This is what I want my daughter to know: that she is not the ranking others assign to her college. She knows how to care, how to love, how to show up, and how to connect, and her worth and joy live there. They always have and they always will. The village knew it, and the research confirms it. It’s time we set down consumer culture’s measuring stick long enough to remember our way back to each other.
