On some days, the internet is one big grass-is-greener stick.

I mean, I like it. I like seeing what other people are doing. I like knowing there’s a great sea of people just like me, trying to succeed via business.

But the effects of collective peeking—that we can all see each other’s work and personal lives, all the time—are odd.

Peeping Toms and NorCal

There’s a strange sense of comfort (look how open and transparent—and human!—we all are!), mixed with a low-grade anxiety (look how much more open, transparent, and human X’s life/company is than mine!) that comes with x-ray vision.

It’s weird. And it’s no wonder some people refuse to join Twitter and Facebook. They turn all but the most confident of us into slobbery peeping toms.

While driving up the coast of Northern California recently, Matt and I stopped at a bed and breakfast. It was late and the inn manager was the only one there, so we drank and talked with her for a while.

She’d moved from tiny little city to tiny little city throughout the years, and now she and her four kids live in Westport. Population: 200.

She said she hated being in big cities. Hated feeling insignificant, hated racing around against people essentially the same herself. Hated thinking her kids might grow up where everyone’s looking at everyone else’s paper.

I kept thinking she’d never make it as a web designer. And I felt her pain.

I Know What You Did Last Summer

The miracles of social media allow me to know what about 100 people who I’ve never met like to drink. I know when they’ve had a bad day. I know if they have kids, and what parenting style they’re into. Their little humany quirks.

I also know what exciting projects they’re working on, how other people respond to their work and how much more or less successful, attractive and artistic they are than me.

This transparency has some very good effects. It’s easier to get to know one another, learn stuff, expand our world and build communities, for example. More people than ever have access to knowledge.

But as with all cultural changes, there are more sinister side effects going on, too. Our transparency—and talent for painting mostly positive pictures of ourselves and emotional states online—lay the groundwork for groupthink, envy, and for the Gargamel types out there, schadenfreude.

Things are getting more democratic and walls are breaking down—but this just means we can see how we really measure up now. Unlike medieval feudal lords, our competition’s only a few steps ahead.

The philosopher David Hume talks about this, in his Treatise of Human Nature:

It is not a great disproportion between ourselves and others which produces envy, but on the contrary, a proximity. A common soldier bears no envy for his general compared to what he will feel for his sergeant or corporal; nor does an eminent writer meet with as much jealousy in common hackney scribblers, as in authors that more nearly approach him.

In other words, democracy and access give us more near-equals to compare ourselves to. As a result, we feel more envious.

Apocalypse Now?

Mass envy followed by active schadenfreude sounds apocalyptic. But I don’t think we’re facing the end of common decency, individuality or a healthy sense of alone-ness in the world.

I think we’re going through a little phase. Like, the world’s first year of college. We’ll have to just stop curling our hair every day and adjust. To deal with the fact that we’re not as special as we’d like to think. There are many people better than us.

And we’ll have to find other ways of being special. Whether it means moving to Westport or having the courage, as my friend Emily recently put it, to just be yourself—even in business, among the peeping toms.