It’s Everyone Else

I remember walking into the lobby of the world’s largest Co-living building for the first time.

It was quieter than I thought it would be.

It had a stillness to it that reminded me of deep waters, where the surface is calm, but jump in and you’ll be swept under by the fast flowing currents below.

I had just started a job with the team responsible for giving the hundreds of people living in the building the experience of a lifetime. We failed more than we succeeded, but I had a front row seat to one of the most ambitious social experiments of our time.

Hundreds of strangers, from all ages and every background imaginable, living together in a building designed like one giant flat share.

Co-living was supposed to be the solution to urban loneliness. Everyone had a tiny dorm room, only big enough to sleep and shower in. Every other space in the building was shared, including kitchens, living rooms, terraces, a games room, a cinema room, and a gym. We also held regular events to help people meet each other, and threw a party every Friday in the large downstairs event space.

In theory, it was the coolest place to live in all of London. And in some ways it was. But in many other ways, it was a total disaster.

Everything that could happen did happen. Every drama under the sun, every type of relationship, conflict, and clique that could exist, did exist. And all of it came and went in waves. The building was a revolving door of new arrivals as people moved in and out much faster than normal apartments.

I watched as some people made lifelong friends, found romantic partners, or became business co-founders. I saw people’s lives change for the better in every way.

I also watched as some people made enemies, isolated themselves, or went through a mental health crisis. Some people definitely left us much worse off than when they arrived.

But here’s the part that kept me up at night, the thing that stuck inside my head and wouldn’t shut up until I finally wrote it all down in this book.

I thought I could tell straight away whether someone was going to suit Co-living or not. I would welcome the new arrivals when they first got to the building, and I looked for things like friendliness, charisma, and confidence. If I found it, I would think this person is going to find the whole experience a walk in the park. But I’d be right almost as often as if I’d just flipped a coin.

It seemed like the building decided at random who was going to enjoy it and who was going to wish they’d never come.

It was a puzzle that followed me through the years as I watched thousands of people come and go.

Why was it a positive life-changing experience for some, and a negative one for others? Everywhere I looked, it was clear that people were having vastly different experiences.

For a long time, I tried putting it down to the individual. Some people must be more open to co-living, more likeable and able to make friends. But my job was to get to know these people, to connect with them. And it became very clear that there were all manner of personalities on both sides of the fence. Some of the most friendly, open, and socially skilled people I knew were having an awful time, while some of the most bitter, immature, and awkward people were living it up.

I became convinced that it had little to do with the individual. The problem was with the community as a whole.

Communities have been around for as long as we have. Much longer if you count the huge number of animals that also live in social groups with common traits and lifestyles. We didn’t invent community, it was passed down to us. And there’s clearly a right and wrong way to do it.

Maybe the reason Co-living wasn’t working for so many people was because it broke the most important rule about being a community in the first place.

Our Confident Past

How confident do you think you’d be if everyone in the world was living the exact same life as you?

Say you live in a small group of 50 people, and they’re the only people you’ll ever know. Everyone in the group has different skills, personalities, social status, and relationships. But everyone lives basically the exact same way you do.

Finding food is the one and only profession. Socialising is a big part of everyone’s day. Songs and stories around the fire are the only nightlife available. Only a few people own a possession that you don’t, like a better stone tool or fur blanket.

You have plenty of things to be worried about of course, but so does everyone else. Starvation, attack from another group, disease, or being eaten by a lion are all real possibilities, but they are equally real for everyone.

So how confident do you think you’d be?

Would you be just as unsatisfied wishing you were a few rungs higher in the group’s social status as you are today wishing you were a celebrity or millionaire? Would it be easier to focus on being the best version of yourself when you didn’t have any extreme examples to compare yourself to? Are the levels of dissatisfaction we feel in the modern world even possible to reach for our tribal ancestors?

It seems like that answer is no. At least, that’s what they said when we asked them.

In his book, Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Daniel Everett describes how the Piraha tribesmen of the Amazon Rainforest never seem to get stressed. He watched their village get destroyed by a storm and couldn’t understand why they sat there laughing as it happened.^{Note 1} It didn’t seem to matter if things were going well or not, if they were going hungry, or how many challenges their dangerous environment threw at them. Because even though the Piraha’s lives weren’t easy, there was nothing in it that they felt they couldn’t handle. They were confident that they had all the skills they needed for the lives they lived.

And it seems the Piraha are not an exception.

Anthropologist Kevin Duffy describes the Mbuti Pygmies from the central African rainforest with a similar confidence in his book, Children of the Forest.^{Note 2} So does the writer Herman Melville in his book about the native people of the South Pacific Marquesas Islands.^{Note 3} And the Maasai people of the African Savanna had their life satisfaction levels studied by researchers, scoring well above your average person.^{Note 4}

For those who idealise our ancient past, these stories seem to back up the claims that the simpler life was better. That having trust in yourself and the people around you is the secret to feeling confident, and living a happy life. But even if that’s all true, it doesn’t solve anything.

No matter how simple you make your life, you can’t escape the modern world anymore. It’s just too interconnected. Even tribes like the Piraha are having to face the consequences of increasing interaction with the outside world. And the more this happens, the more examples you have of better ways you could be living.

As societies replaced tribes, extremes started to emerge. Pharaohs, Kings, Queens, Emperors, Khans, Shoguns, and other elite members of society were living in a way that the majority of people could never have even dreamed of.

Suddenly we were able to compare ourselves to the impossible. We were able to wish for something completely unattainable. And our own lives became something we wish we didn’t have anymore.

You can’t want something you don’t even know exists. The hunter gatherer doesn’t long for the life of a movie star. It’s only through comparing ourselves to others that we’re able to dream of better lives for ourselves. We can want more of what we already have, sure. A hunter gatherer may dream of a life full of food, sex, and ceremonies, despite having never seen anyone live that way. But to want something we’ve never come close to experiencing, we need an example.

There’s no denying our ancestors suffered in ways most of the modern world can’t even imagine. Survival was front and centre of their world. But self-esteem is front and centre of ours. This book is not about the “right” way to live, because there’s no single answer.

It’s about how we are living, and the consequences we all have to face because of it.

Comparing, the good and the bad

The longer I spent working in Co-living, the more I understood why some people loved it and others hated it. Their experiences slowly turned into a clear and predictable set of circumstances.

It went like this.

A person arrived, and if they were lucky then something happened quickly that made them feel like they were part of what’s going on. The most common scenario was that they saw others enjoying themselves and were invited to join in.

Each day brought new opportunities for them to feel like a part of things, or not. That they were living as well as everyone else, or much worse.

Slowly two clear groups formed. Those that felt they were getting the most out of Co-living, and those that felt they were missing out. Part of the community, or excluded from it.

Although friendly and charismatic people had the advantage, they were still vulnerable to this cascade of experiences that could lead them down the path to feeling left behind.

In the end, it didn’t matter who you were anywhere near as much as it mattered what happened to you.

When you live that close to so many other people it’s extremely easy to compare your experience with what’s happening to everyone else. The people who were having a terrible time only felt that way because they could see all the people around them having a great time.

We all like to think of ourselves as independent. We all want to believe that how satisfied we are in life comes down to how we feel about ourselves and that’s it. But the Co-living experiment tells a different story.

It says that who we are comes from how we compare ourselves to others. That the only way to want what you don’t have is to see someone else have it first.

In the end, it’s much easier to define who you are by looking around at everyone else and seeing exactly who you’re not.

How do you think you’d feel about yourself if you were the only person that’s ever existed? A lone human, living on the razor’s edge of survival in a completely natural world. Life would probably be brutal for you, and pain would be part of everyday life. But you’re surviving as best you can, and you’ve made it to adulthood so you definitely know a thing or two about your lonely world and how best to live in it.

As far as you know, you are the absolute best human on Earth. The best human ever. With absolutely no one else to compare yourself to, how could you possibly feel insecure about how well you’re doing in life? All you know is that you’re doing your absolute best, which is the absolute best.

Of course, this doesn’t work in reality because we would just do what we do best, and start comparing ourselves to all the other animals in our environment, like the far more equipped hunters such as lions and wolves, or the animals with powers beyond anything possible for us, like birds and creatures of the sea.

But let’s ignore that for argument’s sake. You don’t feel insecure because life is hard and you’re struggling to survive it. You feel insecure only when you know it’s possible to be doing much better than you currently are. And you can only know that by comparing yourself to someone else. Someone who seems to be better at living than you are.

This is why watching other people having a much better time than you in a Co-living building is so painful. Why seeing influencers showing off their blissful lives every day on social media is making you miserable. And why just the existence of billionaires makes us feel like failures, even when we’ve got more than we need already.

We cannot escape this. We do not live in an empty world. There will always be other people to compare ourselves to.

The older we get, the more we compare, which is why confidence came easy to the little boy in his treehouse, and much harder to the man writing this sentence.

Co-living helped me understand this modern struggle we all face with insecurity.

It has never been easier to feel left behind. Confidence is slipping further and further away from us with each passing year.

Wanting to be yourself has never been harder.

To understand why this is happening, we need to look at one of the greatest gifts our minds have ever given us. It’s so powerful that it helped us rise to the top of the evolutionary ladder, and take complete control over every other living creature on Earth.

But like all things of great value, it has come at a very steep cost, and we are still paying for it today.

A Gift and a Curse

Our greatest strength is, of course, a double edged sword. It seems that nothing good in life can come without its complementary bad.

Abstract thinking is the most beautiful thing our brains can do, and it’s something we develop towards the end of childhood. In a nutshell, it’s how you think about things that aren’t real.

Without it, our thoughts would be limited to things we can see and interact with in the physical world. This means we’d have no creativity, and no ability to solve problems by coming up with new solutions. If we didn’t have abstract thinking, we’d still be foraging for food and running away from the much more successful predators, like our ancestors did for millions of years.

There are lots of amazing things that abstract thinking helps us do, but for this book we only need to understand one of them. It allows us to imagine what it’s like to be someone else.

We can, for instance, picture ourselves living the life of a celebrity, partying in mansions and super yachts. We can imagine what life is like for our boss, with all the freedom and income that they have compared to us. We can even fantasise about some future version of ourselves that overcomes all odds and is living the life of our wildest dreams.

Abstract thinking doesn’t just allow us to understand that our life could be better, it allows us to feel just how much better other people have it compared to us.

In our modern world, comparing ourselves to others is pretty much guaranteed to make you feel insecure. There are just too many examples of better lives shoved in front of our faces every single day.

But anyone that tries to tell you the secret to being confident is to only compare yourself to yourself, or that the only person you need to be better than is who you were yesterday, has no idea how dangerous that advice really is.

They’ve recognised that the heart of the problem is how much we compare ourselves to others, but their solution is impossible. If you truly stopped comparing, you would lose the most important part of being human. You would lose touch with people and the society around you, drifting further and further into your own private world. Comparison helps us connect to each other and it’s an important part of what makes empathy possible.

I can feel sorry for you when bad things happen because I can compare your situation with similar ones of my own. And I can celebrate good things in your life because I’ve experienced similar feelings.

But if I stopped comparing, I would also stop reacting to other people’s situations. I wouldn’t feel their pain, or share their joy, because I wouldn’t be letting them in. I’d be keeping them at a distance, unwilling or unable to take their situation and find the closest comparison from my own life.

If you’re lucky, you’d remain a harmless, though emotionally distant person. If you’re unlucky, you’d become detached and turn yourself into a cruel, even abusive person, unable to realise that your actions are hurting others.

It seems we’ve hit an impasse. All of our insecurity, and consequent unhappiness with our lives, comes from comparing ourselves to others. But we can’t stop it because it also plays an important role in human connection, which gives us all the best things in life, like friendship and love.

Maybe the problem isn’t comparison. Maybe we’ve just been doing it wrong.

Maybe the answer to all our problems, the way to finally be confident with ourselves and live a life that is free from insecurity, isn’t to stop comparing ourselves to others, but to get better at it instead.

Maybe we’ve just been comparing ourselves to the wrong things this entire time.

The Forgotten Father of Psychology

During my first year studying psychology, I was taught all about the field’s most famous founding father, Sigmund Freud. We learned about his methods and ideology, and he was treated with respect by the professors and students alike. Yet, with every new thing we learned about him, we also learned that modern thinking in the field has shown that it’s wrong.

The most famous founder of psychology that ever lived, and most of his major ideas failed to pass the test of time.

The other name I heard a great deal about that year was Carl Jung, arguably the second most popular founding father of psychology. But there’s one name I have absolutely no memory of hearing. If he was mentioned, it was so fleeting that I wouldn’t end up learning who he was until over 10 years later, completely by accident while researching for this book.

His name was Alfred Adler.

Born in Vienna in 1870, the second born of seven children. It was said he had a fierce rivalry with his older brother who was apparently his mother’s favourite^{Note 5}, a rivalry I can easily understand, as I’m the second born of eight children and there were always rivalries between my siblings while we were growing up.

Adler became a doctor for obvious reasons. He was a sickly child, battling rickets and pneumonia at a young age. He also witnessed the death of his younger brother, and developed an understandable fear of dying, something that helped shape his unique perspective on psychology.

Adler’s story truly began during his friendship with the famous Sigmund Freud, who brought him into his inner circle in 1902 after he wrote an article defending Freud’s work. It was the beginning of the psychoanalytic movement that would change the way we thought about ourselves for the next century and beyond.

Bright, popular, and full of his own unique ideas, Adler eventually became the president of what was then called the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1910.

However, only one year later, Adler broke free of Freud’s circle for good, something that Carl Jung would also do a few years later.

Adler was one of the first psychotherapists to get rid of the classic analytic couch, where the patient spent the session awkwardly lying down, often with the therapist sitting behind them out of eyesight. Instead he used two chairs, like modern day therapy, allowing everyone to sit together as equals.

He was so far ahead of his time that he even understood the importance of making his work accessible, and when he presented his ideas in speeches or writing, he used a conversational style that was easily understood.

But perhaps the greatest testament to his ability to see things for what they really were was the way he never claimed to have all the answers. He believed that “the science of human nature finds itself today in the condition that chemistry occupied in the days of alchemy.”^{Note 6} He always embraced this constant pursuit for knowledge and was excited about how much there still was to learn.

Although history often casts Adler as a student of Freud’s, they considered each other colleagues, and their growing disagreements about human nature eventually turned their relationship into something of a rivalry. Once again Adler found himself with a highly regarded older rival, just like his relationship with his brother. The reason Adler could stand up to an influential man like Freud was probably because he’d already had some practice. It wouldn’t have been easy to disagree with someone so popular, but Adler wasn’t the kind of person to follow someone he thought was heading in the wrong direction.

The main difference between Adler and Freud was that Adler believed who we are in our social contexts is just as important as who we are in an individual context. That our sense of self extends far beyond us and includes how we fit into our social circles and wider society. He writes in his book The Science of Living, that the “individual becomes an individual only in a social context.”^{Note 7}

Most other systems of psychology separate what they consider individual psychology and social psychology, but for Adler, these were two parts of the same whole. Just as Albert Einstein showed us that space and time are part of the same unified whole in his masterpiece The Special Theory of Relativity, Adler understood that in order to truly know who we are, we had to unite our individual selves with our social selves.

The Origin Of Insecurity

We have always existed as part of a community first, and as individuals second.^{Note 8} This isn’t a chicken or egg type of scenario. You are who you are because of everybody else around you.

As Adler puts it in his book Understanding Human Nature, the “communal life of man” came before the “individual life of man.”

Adler believed that only courageous and confident people could use both the good and the bad parts of life and turn them into something beneficial. To him, confidence was about knowing you could handle absolutely anything life could throw at you. And that all of our problems are, at their core, social problems.^{Note 9}

To put it simply, every good or bad thing you think about yourself, is only possible because there are other people around you to compare yourself to.

If you were the only person in the world, you wouldn’t be a failure, even if you did absolutely nothing all day, because there would be no success to compare with. You wouldn’t be evil, because there’d be no one to harm, or to condemn you for acting in the wrong way. And you wouldn’t be insecure, because the only example you have of how a person should be is you.

When I asked you earlier to imagine yourself as the only person on Earth, you probably didn’t feel very confident, but if it were actually true then you wouldn’t need this book. Confidence would be your default. Not because your life is easy, but because it’s the only life you know.

The truth is, we have a very good reason to be insecure around other people.

Humans survived for hundreds of thousands of years by working together. If you didn’t have other people helping you, you didn’t last long. If you really want to understand why you’re so afraid of what other people think, then imagine yourself spending a week in the year 14,000 BC. If the locals decide they don’t like you, you won’t be making it through your first day.

For most of our history, being rejected by those around us was more or less a death sentence. So it’s not surprising that insecurity still messes with us today.

Being rejected by others is not a death sentence anymore, but it can definitely still feel this way. And let’s be honest, our lives can still be seriously damaged if the wrong people decide they don’t like us.

It’s our fear of death that pushes us to relentlessly compare ourselves to everyone around us. We make judgements about everyone else’s success, and fear their judgements of us in return. We want to be in the best position possible, and know that we need the love, or at least respect, of everyone else to get there.

This is where our sense of self comes from. It’s our way of predicting how others must see us. It gives us something to work with so we can make any necessary changes that will hopefully help us survive.

How we create our sense of self is fascinating, and a little bit complicated. But once you know how it’s made, you also know how it can be changed.

Which makes it the most important thing you’ll ever learn in your life.

It’s not just about knowing who you are now. It’s about knowing how to become the person you’ve always wanted to be.