Between the Window and the Stage

One evening toward the end of winter, Lina was waiting for a single message: a decision after her interview for the design job. Since noon she had checked her email four times and found nothing new. She picked up her phone to check a fifth time, but opened an old university classmate’s account instead.

The first photo showed a cup of coffee beside a wide window, an open book, and a line underneath: “My mornings begin in peace.” She scrolled a little and found a photo from her classmate’s trip the previous month: a city by the sea. Next came a photo of her classmate in a long, sand-colored coat, with hundreds of comments underneath. Most said, “You have such lovely taste!” Lina saved this photo on her phone without asking herself why.

Then she looked up from the screen. On the table lay an accounts spreadsheet she had to submit in the morning. Her father had called twice that day about a dripping tap in his kitchen. He did not know she was waiting for an answer. She could find nothing in her day worth photographing, and her whole life seemed smaller than her classmate’s. She opened a message to her and typed, “How are you?” After years without speaking, the question felt strange. She closed the app without sending it.

You may close the app knowing the photo leaves things out, while the comparison stays open in your head. You do not need another explanation of the trick. You need to name what you were asking of that photo: a life like yours, something you could learn, or something you are waiting for someone to say about you.

Why This Particular Window?

In the middle of the last century, psychologist Leon Festinger made a simple observation that later became a whole theory¹. In essence, we need to know where we stand in our abilities, opinions, and lives. He called this need “social comparison.” It happens automatically, without our deciding to take part.

When there is no clear measure, no number or finish line, we turn to another measure: other people. But not just anyone. We compare ourselves with people like us: roughly our age, graduates of the same year, or people who have lived through similar circumstances.

Lina’s classmate had graduated with her in the same year. They had sat in the same lecture halls. So Lina saw more than a stranger’s life in those photos. She saw a measure of her own.

In his book Wanting, writer Luke Burgis draws on an idea from the French thinker René Girard called “mimetic desire”². In essence, most of our desires are less original than we think. We want things because people like us want them, own them, or seem happy with them. Our desire is borrowed from someone we see as a model. It does not come from within us alone.

From Thief to Teacher

Researchers Niels van de Ven, Marcel Zeelenberg, and Rik Pieters studied two different kinds of what we call “envy”³. In the first, you wish the other person would lose what they have. In the second, you want to have what they have, without wishing them harm. Researchers call the second “benign envy” and the first “malicious envy.”

The first is a thief: it steals your happiness now and gives you nothing in return. The second is a teacher: it shows you what is possible and leaves the task of getting there to you.

When your friend wins a race, the sting may make you wish she had lost, or lead you to ask about her training program. You cannot always choose the first sting. But you can choose what you do afterward.

Here is a reminder that brings your eyes back to what you have: “Look at those who have less than you, rather than those who have more. This is more likely to keep you from belittling Allah’s blessings upon you.” (Muslim 2963)⁴.

When You Turn the Window Toward Yourself

You may close the window on other people’s lives only to open your own for them. Here the question changes. “Why isn’t my life like this?” becomes “How can I make them see my life this way?”

You compose a post about peace, choose a photo for it, then wait for a number to reassure you that your audience believed it.

You check your screen two minutes later: three likes. You close it and check again: seven. Something small settles, then the question of how much is enough returns.

Why do you care what people think when you do not know their names and will never meet them?

In his book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life⁵, sociologist Erving Goffman offered a simple idea: each of us chooses how to present ourselves to the people in front of us.

He described this in the language of theater. In front of the audience, we manage our role. Backstage, we find room to set it aside. But the screen brings the audience into the room with you, even when you are alone.

Choosing what you show is not in itself a lie. But what does it cost you when your audience becomes a number that never sleeps?

Researcher Adam Alter wrote about this shift in his book Irresistible⁶. He explains how engineers deliberately designed these apps to make it hard for you to stop looking at them.

Before checking your screen, you do not know how many likes await you or who has commented. The unpredictable reward draws you back to find out again.

Behind the Picture of Peace

About forty thousand people follow Lina’s classmate’s account. Every morning she posts a photo of her coffee beside the window, with a line about peace. The comments fill with praise.

Three more nights passed without an answer from the company. Every night Lina returned to her classmate’s photos. On the fourth night she opened their messages and found “How are you?” where she had left it. Tired of knowing her classmate only through photos, she sent it.

The reply came in the morning, unlike anything she had expected. “I haven’t had a peaceful night’s sleep in months. I write about peace, then stay up reading comments until three in the morning.” She said she had deleted a comment the day before that read, “All of this is overdone,” even though she knew its writer was right. Her followers expected a calm face every morning, even on days when she needed someone to calm her. She ended with, “You’re the first person to ask how I am in a long time.”

Lina read the reply twice. What she learned did not make her happy. She did not feel she had won anything. But she understood that the coffee photo was one moment in her classmate’s day, rather than the whole day. Then she wrote to her about the interview and the answer she was waiting for.

The standard goes beyond the picture you choose. Remember the hadith we encountered in chapter 6: Allah looks at hearts and deeds rather than appearances and wealth. Let us return to the actions we live by once the screen is off.

Desire Before the Picture

Lina knew what lay behind her classmate’s photos. Even so, during her lunch break she opened the one she had saved: the sand-colored coat, with “You have such lovely taste!” underneath. She searched for the coat in an online store. Before the page had finished loading, she had worked out the price: a third of her salary. She opened her notes to write why she wanted it. “They’ll notice I’ve changed,” she wrote. Then, “They’ll tell me I have lovely taste.” She read both lines. They were about people, not the coat. She erased them and wrote instead, “Do I really want this, or do I want to avoid seeming inferior to her?” She did not know the answer yet. She closed the store page and finished her lunch.

A Window to Learn Through, a Life to Live

That night Lina turned off the app’s notifications, then opened it herself ten minutes later. Her classmate had posted another photo from that trip: the sea at sunset. She remembered the line “If you fall,” and asked the question again as she looked at this photo: Do I really want this? She found that she did not long for the sea or for travel. She wanted a single hour when no one asked anything of her and she waited for nothing: no accounts spreadsheet, no tap in her father’s kitchen, no decision about the interview. She told her husband. “Then we’ll leave the dishes for a while,” he said. She laughed and looked at the full sink. They agreed on half an hour after dinner, without work or screens.

The next night, after dinner, Lina put her phone on the kitchen shelf, and her husband put his beside it. She left the dishes in the sink and sat by the living-room window with a cup of tea. Her husband sat beside her. Beyond this window there was no sea, only their street and the light of the shop opposite. She did not get up to see whether a decision about the interview had arrived. She drank her tea while it was hot.

The Subtler Mask

An audience does not always mean thousands of followers. There is a subtler mask than a polished photo. You wait for a small team who know your name to say about you what you will not say plainly yourself.

After Karim secured a win for his gaming team, he said something that began to recur: “I didn’t do anything.”

He had practiced that round with the team for weeks. Yet he said it, then fell silent and waited.

Karim smiled and left a small space in the conversation for praise. A teammate laughed. “True. We didn’t see you in the round at all.” Karim moved the mouse and closed the chat window. In the next round he repeated his old line: “I didn’t do anything.” He only noticed he had said it when the others fell silent.

He moved his headset aside a little. On the screen was a record of his weeks of training. In the chat was a sentence saying he had done nothing. He opened the text box and typed a long reply explaining what he had done in the round, then stopped. His teammate’s voice came through: “Karim, can you hear me?” Karim erased the entire reply. “I can hear you,” he said.

A single sentence does not reveal its speaker’s intention. What you can observe is the repeated downplaying of effort and the wait for someone to say the opposite.

Sezer, Gino, and Norton called the mixing of boasting with complaint or apparent humility “humblebragging”⁷. In their experiments, this style seemed less sincere than outright boasting. This finding concerns the listener’s impression. It is not a window into every speaker’s intentions.

In the next conversation Karim began, “I didn’t do…” and stopped. His teammate laughed. “Say it again.” Karim looked at the training record. “I worked hard on this, and I’m proud of it,” he said. The team fell silent for a moment. “And you should be,” his teammate said. The tightness did not disappear, but he did not take back what he had said to make them praise his effort. When his teammate corrected one final move in the round, Karim almost explained why he had not been wrong. Then he said, “Yes, you’re right about that.”

The round ended. He had said two things he was not used to saying: he had made an effort, and there was a mistake he could fix. He had not waited for praise after either or defended the whole round. He closed the training record, took off his headset, and switched off the screen without returning to the chat to see who had replied.

Acknowledging real effort and accepting a valid point do not need a counter. Someone who says, “Yes, you’re right,” leaves room to say, “I broke my promise.” The person whose opinion you trust can be an honest witness to both.

A Page You Do Not Post

Take five minutes, with no phone nearby, and write in a notebook: Which account steals more from you than it teaches you? Try hiding it for one week. Then ask: What feeling do you present on your account, and do you actually feel it these days? Also write down the sentence you use to downplay your effort in front of people who know you, and what you wait for them to say afterward.

Then close the notebook. No one needs to see this page. That is exactly what makes it worth writing.

After a fever kept him in bed for two weeks, Karim had not returned to his running sheet. But he called his father from his room in the dorm to tell him his new sentence: “I worked hard this semester, and I’m proud of it.” His father paused. Then he said, “Well done. But…”