If not for our tendency to compare, there would have been no jealousy and no desire to impersonate, to imitate someone’s talent or luck. Alas, comparing is hardwired into humans. We recognize music by comparing one tone to another, we see color harmoniously by juxtaposing and we close business deals to market value. Not only the value is relative but we are not capable of valuation without comparison. Dan Ariely famously writes about the real estate example, how a buyer of a house can only close a deal if s/he has seen and compared several houses.
Mass communication in general and the internet in particular exacerbated this problem with lightening speed. Suddenly you have the entire world at your fingertips ready to be compared. This has disastrous consequences. A house is being compared to an international publication; a regular woman to a supermodel, programmers can be hired across the international time lines, local craftsmen are outsourced, etc. The only professions that are safe from this plague are people who work with their hands. You can’t be a virtual dentist or a virtual plumber. But of course on the flip side of this “fortune”, dentists and plumbers can’t scale. Nassim Taleb speaks to this very issue rather elegantly in his podcast interview with Russ Roberts:
“Before the Internet [you] couldn’t spread cultural ideas very fast. After Internet, Harry Potter effect, whole planet reading the same book. Planetary-wide fads. Leads to large right-hand tails for small group of people; could be negative tails. Concentration of income for some people in sports or arts: fewer people making larger and larger incomes. Local opera singer who performs at weddings. If no way to store your voice, opera singer in Italy has audience because people who love opera have to go to Italy to hear it. Now, gramophone, later the Internet, technology allows you to hear anybody, so why listen to that poor guy. Whole planet will have a handful of opera singers making huge amount of money. Dentist cannot store, leverage, or scale his work…”
To make matters worse you are in direct completion with best opera singers of your generation plus you are competing with the YouTube clips of the dead Luciano Pavarotti. No profession, especially a creative profession is immune for this global plague. Art is always a ratio between talent and myth (aka) fame. Fame can elevate a mediocre talent. In the age of the internet that ratio between art, myth and luck shifts drastically towards myth, especially manufactured myth.
But let’s get back to the good old curse of comparisons. There is not worse flaw in the creation or evolution. We would have lived happily in a cave if not for our agony comparing ourselves to other people . Perhaps there would have been no progress, but progress at what cost?
Further Reading:
The Art of Selling Art
Seth Godin on Scalejacking
Empathy in the time of a Plague
