A Scary Place To Be

It's a scary place to be, when everyone tells you how great you're doing and you can't see the benefits. They are all looking at the same person you are and seeing something you can't, and being told about it again doesn't make it appear.

You look in the mirror and nothing seems different, you see the same piece of shit that's always been there. You've made no progress when everyone around you says you have, and every well done that comes in gets held up against that mirror and loses.

Then you read the comments, the ones that tell you that in fact you're not doing great. You're slow, you're old and you should give up, and those are the ones that stick. Roy Baumeister's review Bad Is Stronger Than Good found that bad feedback has more impact than good, and that people are more motivated to avoid a bad view of themselves than to pursue a good one. One stranger agreeing with the mirror counts for more than everyone around you disagreeing with it.

This is not a good thing. You might have moved, but you can't see it when you're never satisfied. Your Strava has others on it doing their Z2 runs at your tempo pace, so their easy day is your hard one and whatever you upload looks slow before anyone has commented on it. Researchers at MIT followed runners on an app like it and found people did run more when their friends did, only it went in one direction, the runners doing less pulled along the ones doing more and it didn't work the other way round. The people ahead of you on the feed don't make you run more, they just make what you ran look slow.

You can wipe every personal best and start counting again from zero, and the feed is still full of other people running faster. Between the mirror, the comments and the feed, you could easily give up.