Comparison Is the Thief of Joy.

Before the PhD, you and everyone around you moved on roughly the same timeline. You went to high school the same year, entered college the same year, graduated the same year, and had the same finish line in view. The shared timeline gives you and your peers common experiences, common milestones, and a shared sense of where you stand relative to everyone else. Then the PhD begins, and the pace of your life starts to diverge from your peers faster than you expected.

“No, I Have a Paper to Work On”

Your college friends who went into industry are now living a different life, with the most obvious differences being in the salary and work-life balance. They clear in two weeks what your stipend clears in two months. They have weekends that are actually free, holidays that are actually holidays, and a manager who tells them what success looks like by Friday. You have a project that might work in a year, a stipend that makes you think twice about a nice dinner, and a calendar where the boundary between Tuesday and Saturday has quietly dissolved.

But more fundamentally, the divergence lies between the things that trouble you and the things that trouble them in day-to-day life. Your industry friends are thinking about promotions, salary negotiations, whether to switch companies, where to take the holiday vacation, and maybe purchasing an apartment. On the contrary, you are thinking about how to frame a research question, how to draft a logically coherent motivation, and whether your experimental design is rigorous enough.

When a friend asks whether you want to hang out in the evening or during the weekend, your answer is increasingly “no, I have a paper to work on,” and over months, the opportunities to connect become fewer and fewer. Even when you do sit together, you find yourselves reaching for common ground that is no longer there. The topics that consume your daily life are almost unrecognizable to each other. It is not surprising for most junior PhD students to feel a specific kind of loneliness: they feel disconnected from the majority of people their age, and they worry that they are falling behind or will not be able to catch up.

The pressure does not only come from friends your own age. It also comes from the people who love you most, the family and the broader culture you were raised in, who carry their own expectations about what you should have achieved by now and on what timeline. If you crossed an ocean to be here, the weight grows heavier, since your family may have spent real money and real sacrifice to send you, and you end up carrying their hopes stacked on top of your own. Almost all of it comes from love and from a genuine stake in how your life turns out, and the hard part is that the people setting these expectations usually have no working model of how research actually goes.

In fact, the divergence is expected. The PhD training is positioning you to dedicate several years to understanding yourself, developing critical thinking, learning how to teach yourself anything you want to learn, and identifying what you are genuinely interested in. These capacities take time to develop, and if you successfully develop them, that growth will make you completely different from people who have not gone through the same kind of training.

The divergence is part of the cost of that development, and whether the cost is worth it depends entirely on why you chose the PhD in the first place. If your primary values are a higher salary, a clear work-life boundary, and staying in step with your college friends, then the changes the PhD brings may not be what you want, and it is far better to know that honestly than to discover it three years in.

Maintaining your friendships and relationships through this divergence is something you will need to handle actively, because the deeper you get into the training, the more your priorities and your friends’ priorities will move apart. There will be moments of pain, misunderstanding, and difficult conversations that you should expect and prepare for, even if I cannot prescribe how to navigate them.

Peer Pressure Is Good for Nothing

The comparison against industry friends at least has the decency to be obvious, since you can both see that you chose different roads. The comparison that does the real damage is the one inside your own field, against people walking the exact same road as you.

You will always find someone who is moving faster: someone more talented, someone who works harder than seems humanly reasonable, someone who got lucky with a project (or a lot of projects, if they are genuinely lucky) that simply worked, or some unfair combination of all three. They publish at venues you are still too intimidated to submit to. They have a string of highlights on their website while you are still struggling with your first study. What their website does not show is the three rejections behind the one acceptance, the year a project went nowhere, the advisor who rewrote the framing four times, or the review that called their best idea incremental. Everyone curates the highlights and quietly buries the rest, so you end up comparing your unedited daily footage to their trailer.

The scale of divergence among PhD students is genuinely astonishing. Some researchers produce five or even ten accepted papers a year, and watching them from the outside, they look like a different species. Some are getting one paper a year and still building strong careers. Some are simply enjoying their life as they move toward graduation. If you are applying for a PhD right now (2026), I can tell you that the top applicants already have three or more top-tier publications, an amount that would have been sufficient for an entire PhD degree five years ago. If you do not have those papers, it is understandable to feel that you are not as capable, not as hardworking, and not as worthy of a position as those applicants are.

What I can also tell you is that many of the researchers I respect most were not the ones with the longest publication lists when they started. Some found their direction late. Some spent years building skills that did not produce visible output until much later. The trajectory matters far more than the snapshot, and the people who are leading the field today were not necessarily the ones who looked the most impressive in their first or second year.

More fundamentally, the comparison is almost completely irrelevant to your development. Every person has their own environment, background, resources, encounters, and timing. Some had access to exceptional mentors early. Some were in the right lab at the right time. Some are genuinely extraordinary, and they will always exist. Comparing your trajectory to theirs tells you nothing about your own capacity to grow, in the same way that comparing your chemistry midterm to someone else’s swimming time tells you nothing about either performance.

You vs. You

If you have read the earlier post on self-motivation, the pattern here should look familiar. That post argued that you have to shift from external evaluation to internal evaluation, since the steady external validation you got in school is simply not coming anymore. Comparison is the same problem wearing a social costume: when you measure yourself against a labmate’s acceptance rate, you are once again handing an external signal the authority to decide whether you are okay, and it is an even worse signal than the grades you used to chase, since two PhD projects are never the same exam.

The single move that works for everyone I have watched get through this is to refocus the question from “how am I doing against them” to “how am I developing.” Look at the version of you from three months ago. Have you genuinely improved? What have you learned? What skills are sharper now? What is still lacking, and what do you want to improve next? As long as you are continuously improving, you are collecting an unstoppable momentum that will compound over years, and the short-term gap between you and the person who published more this year will stop mattering entirely.

The reason I trust this approach is that the people I consider the best researchers in the community do not use publication counts or citation numbers as their primary evaluation of a person. When they are deciding whether someone is good, they talk to them. They assess whether your thinking is sharp, whether you can reason critically about a problem, whether your knowledge has genuine depth, and whether you are devoted to the work you do. They are looking for someone whose mind they respect, and that quality is not captured by any leaderboard.

The publication and citation metrics exist as standardized benchmarks that give the majority of the community a rough way to compare, and for that purpose they are useful, but they are not what the people at the top of the field actually care about when they evaluate a person. Targeting those benchmarks as your primary goal is neither healthy nor sustainable, because there will always be outliers who produce more, and chasing them will exhaust you without making you better.

What Really Matters

The PhD and the research career that may follow it is a long-term journey. What matters at the end is whether you became a person who thinks critically, knows what they care about, can articulate their ideas in ways others appreciate and understand, and carries a depth of knowledge that is evident the moment you open your mouth. That version of yourself is what the best people in the field are looking for when they consider collaborators, colleagues, and future faculty. More importantly, that version of yourself will serve you in every career you pursue and every dimension of your life, whether you stay in research or not.

Once the comparison loosens its grip, something useful happens to how you see the people around you. The same labmate whose pace was making you miserable turns back into what they actually are, which is one of the sharpest people you have regular access to, someone you can learn from, argue with, and build something alongside. You cannot collect that joy and run a leaderboard against the same people at the same time. Put your energy into the room with them, not into a ranking against them.