The Collapse of Comparison: What Happens When AI Breaks the Instinct That Built Your Identity

All week my seven-year-old has been looping Olivia Rodrigo’s Jealousy, Jealousy. A song about envy, comparison, the ache of wanting to be someone else. She’s in primary school. Olivia is twenty-two.

And somehow they’ve both already learnt what took me decades to name: Comparison doesn’t just measure you. It bends the mirror you see yourself through.

The song has hundreds of millions of streams because people feel it in their bodies. That sting when someone seems ahead of you. That small surge of pride when you feel ahead of them. Then the hollow drop when their highlight reel makes your life look small. And the quiet fear that you’re suddenly behind again.

If a seven-year-old can feel this, imagine what it’s doing to your teams.

But here’s what most leaders miss. The comparison machine isn’t just getting louder. It’s collapsing. And in that collapse, something unexpected is becoming possible.

What your people are experiencing isn’t a performance problem. It’s an identity shift they can’t yet articulate. The coordinates they’ve used to understand their worth are dissolving.

If you don’t help them navigate this, you won’t just lose productivity. You’ll lose them to the chaos of not knowing who they are when the old measures stop working.

The Ancient Logic of Comparison

Comparison isn’t a glitch in your psychology. It’s survival software that’s been running for around 200,000 years.

Your brain evolved to read a tiny tribe, not a civilisation. Back then you had maybe 150 people to measure yourself against. Those faces were your whole world of safety and belonging. Knowing where you stood kept you alive.

As societies grew, the instinct stretched. Villages became cities. Workforces became organisations. But the scale stayed human enough that your brain could still track who was rising, who was falling, and where you fit.

Somewhere along that journey, though, the instinct changed jobs.

What began as a tool for survival became a tool for identity. Comparison stopped keeping you safe and started telling you who you are, what you’re worth, and how to make sense of your place in the world.

Then social media arrived and hurled you into a crowd of millions. A brain built for small groups was suddenly ranking itself on a global stage. And for a while, the rules still made sense. Human versus human. You could roughly tell who was ahead and why.

AI breaks that logic entirely.

Your nervous system reacts to being outpaced long before it processes the source. Whether it’s a human who trained for years or a model that produced it instantly, the primitive brain reads both as someone sprinting ahead.

It triggers the same ancient survival alarm and, in the same breath, makes you question the worth of your own identity.

The work that once signalled intelligence, the tasks that took years to master, can now be done by a machine in moments. And something about that shift doesn’t just feel disorienting. It feels like the ground moving beneath you.

The ancient comparison reflex that once kept your ancestors safe is now the very thing fracturing modern identity.

Mark Manson, speaking on the Solved podcast, puts words to what most people feel but can’t articulate. We compare ourselves to friends, colleagues, even strangers online, and it cuts deeper than it should.

Not because their lives are better, but because comparison has fused with identity. Envy shows you what feels missing. Aspiration shows you what feels possible. Both are reflections, not verdicts.

He also names the paradox we rarely admit: the higher you climb, the more fragile you feel. Status becomes a loop you can’t escape. And the constant measuring of your life against everyone else’s might be one of the least intelligent instincts we’ve inherited, yet we run it on autopilot.

Comparison and Pyramid Thinking

Once you really see comparison, you start to see the structure holding it up. Pyramid thinking. It’s the instinct that quietly sorts people into ‘above’ and ‘below’ before you’ve even realised it.

Comparison is the signal. The pyramid is the story your brain builds around it.

Who’s rising. Who’s slipping. Who matters. Every organisation has one. Every social circle. A shape you never chose but somehow learnt to live inside.

And sometimes you rise in that shape. Sometimes you fall. And your identity rises and falls with it.

Like everyone else, I learnt this the hard way.

At the height of my previous business, flying around the country speaking on stages, I could feel myself climbing that pyramid. Externally I was expanding. New skills. New reach. New opportunities.

But internally a quieter story was forming about where I sat, who I was above, who I was now ‘ahead’ of.

If I was on a stage like the thought leaders I’d spent years admiring, then surely I mattered. Surely I’d arrived. Looking back, that was a dangerous story to carry: the belief that altitude equals identity.

It wasn’t conscious or cruel. It was instinct. Ancient wiring dressed up as ambition.

Because here’s the part we almost never admit: success in a pyramid doesn’t feel like becoming bigger. It feels like becoming safer.

Which is why, when I hit my own version of a snake in the snakes-and-ladders game, the fall hurt more than the failure.

I left the business for a new project that fell apart within three months. The consulting process I’d spent years refining was suddenly lower in demand. Bigger players had moved into the speaking space. And AI was beginning to automate the very skills I had spent a lifetime mastering.

I went from altitude to ground level almost overnight. And I felt it in every corner of my identity.

For the past few years, I’ve done a painful amount of soul-searching, not because I lost work, but because I lost my place in the pyramid I’d been climbing.

That’s the part we don’t talk about. The shock isn’t the fall. It’s realising how much of yourself you’d tied to being someone because you were somewhere.

And that’s when I finally saw the deeper pattern underneath it. The climb itself.

The way we move through our needs long before we ever chase achievement, just as Maslow described decades ago.

At the base of the pyramid you want safety, to feel steady and secure. A level up, you want belonging, to be accepted and included. Higher still, you want esteem, to be recognised and valued. And near the top sits significance, the sense that who you are actually matters.

For the record, and out of respect, Maslow never drew a pyramid. That was the invention of management theorists. But we swallowed it whole, and somewhere in the process began to imagine that purpose lived only at the summit.

Sitting right beside that is social comparison theory, which explains why we look sideways to understand ourselves in the first place.

Comparison becomes the emotional compass. The pyramid becomes the map. Put them together and suddenly self-worth feels like a level to reach rather than a life to live.

When the Pyramid Collapses

And this is exactly where the bridge back to AI begins. Because what happened to me individually is now happening collectively.

The pyramid we’ve built our identities on is collapsing. The work we were taught to chase is being automated. The hierarchy we used to measure ourselves against is dissolving. The placement we once relied on no longer holds.

And with it, the old idea of purpose is collapsing too. The linear, one-grand-mission version. The ‘find your why’, follow-the-north-star model that was built on the same pyramid thinking.

When that structure falls away, the world doesn’t feel more advanced. It feels unstable. It doesn’t feel like innovation. It feels like losing your footing.

To make that real, let me give it a face. Not a real person, but a fictional one who captures what millions are quietly living.

Daniel is forty-two and works in financial services. Solid. Steady. The kind of person who always knew where he sat in the pyramid. Not the top. Not the bottom. Just a place that felt safe.

Then the world flattened.

When the world flattens, your story glitches. The roles that once made you feel intelligent or essential are suddenly the first to be automated. The tasks that lived at the top of the pyramid are now done in seconds.

Daniel feels it every day.

A junior analyst producing work in minutes he once spent hours on. An automated workflow that outpaces him. A generated deck that looks like his, only faster.

He hasn’t lost his job. He’s losing the quiet worth it once gave him.

People don’t fear losing work. They fear losing the meaning that work held up.

The unspoken belief that this is who I am.

That’s the identity threat researchers are naming everywhere. It isn’t fear of the technology. It’s fear of becoming replaceable in the place you once felt you belonged.

And while this is happening, AI is rewriting the comparison field.

The scroll is no longer a window. It’s a spotlight. The brightest, sharpest fragments of success on repeat. Upward comparisons fired at your nervous system all day long.

Daniel feels that too. He opens LinkedIn to stay informed, but half an hour later he feels behind. Not because he is, but because the measuring system changed and no one told him.

At the same time, the hierarchy itself is dissolving.

For generations, we used a simple shape to organise identity. Up meant progress. Down meant failure. Certain roles lived at the top. Certain achievements meant you’d arrived. Daniel built his whole story inside that shape. Most of us did.

But AI erases those markers. When a system can do high-status work instantly, the old ranking logic collapses.

Think about the jobs we were all taught to chase. The clever jobs. The strategic jobs. Strategy. Analysis. Design. Writing. For decades they were the work that signalled intelligence and status.

Now they’re the first tasks a machine can do in seconds. When a model can produce a polished deck in twelve minutes, the hierarchy you were raised to climb flips. The person fixing your hot water becomes more essential than the executive whose core tasks a machine can mimic.

Suddenly no one knows who’s ahead or what ‘ahead’ even means. We don’t know what’s real, what’s manufactured, or what deserves celebration. The pyramid disappears, and the inner map we’ve used since childhood begins to blur.

This is the wobble leaders are feeling everywhere. Not laziness. Not fragility. A nervous system trying to navigate a world where the coordinates are gone and no new ones exist yet.

AI didn’t just change the work. It changed the mirrors we use to know ourselves.

What Becomes Possible

And this is the part most people don’t see.

When comparison breaks and the pyramid dissolves, you aren’t just losing a story about work. You’re losing the coordinates you once used to understand yourself.

The mind rushes to fill the gap. Am I still growing? Do I still matter? If the roles that once defined me are now automated, then what anchors me now?

But here’s the quiet truth sitting beneath the chaos.

The collapse isn’t taking your identity. It’s releasing it.

Because the version of you that comparison built was never the whole you. It was the reflexive you. The survival you. The self shaped by looking sideways instead of inward.

When the pyramid falls, that version loses its map. But the deeper self, the one not built on ranking or speed or status, finally has room to breathe.

This is the shift AI is forcing, whether we’re ready or not. The ladders are glitching. The old cues are dissolving. And in the quiet that follows, something ancient reappears.

Not the instinct to compete, but the capacity to choose who you are when you’re no longer performing for a place in the hierarchy. To choose who you are when worth isn’t measured by output, but by coherence. To choose who you are when purpose stops being a peak to reach and becomes the daily practice that anchors you in a sea of change.

It is the rediscovery of who we are outside comparison and competition. A return to collaboration, to union, to the deeper intelligence we share rather than the rankings we chase. From that centre, almost anything becomes possible.

And within that possibility lies the real work of this era. Not reclaiming old identities, but shaping new ones from the inside out.

Keep purpose in motion and progress human,

Rebecca