Why You Compare Yourself to Other Musicians (And Why It Feels So Bad)

Gökçe Kutsal
4 days ago
6 min read

It didn't used to feel like this, did it?

For a lot of musicians, music starts as a refuge. Not in the sense that no one hears it — in the sense that it isn't being measured all the time.

You play because you enjoy it. Because it lets something out. Because it feels like somewhere you can go where things make sense for a bit.

There isn't a constant awareness of where you sit compared to everyone else.

And then, at some point, that changes. The moment you start to compare yourself to other musicians, something shifts.

When Music Stops Being a Refuge

Sometimes it's when you decide to take it seriously — conservatoire, auditions, a professional path...

Sometimes it happens more gradually. You find yourself in spaces where the level is higher, the expectations are different, and suddenly there are more people to measure yourself against.

What I see quite often is that the comparison starts before anyone else has actually compared you to anything.

You do it first.

You look around and start mapping where you fall:

Who's ahead. Who's been doing this longer. Who's won things. Who seems more secure, more confident, more… convincing.

And you see, even if it doesn't feel like it, this is coming from a well-meaning place.

Why You Compare Yourself to Other Musicians in the First Place

Simply put: Your mind is trying to protect you.

The reasoning underneath it goes something like:

If I judge myself first, the judgment of other people won't hurt as much.

(Weird, right? As if hurting yourself first would make the secondary impact hurt less...)

So your mind creates this safety mechanism. It starts comparing you to anyone you might come up against — child prodigies, people who've been doing this for longer, people who won things young, people who were admired in their school or conservatoire for their abilities.

It highlights all the ways you fall below the curve.

(All these years, I've never once met a musician who is content with how they compare to others.)

This is very detrimental, because something you used to enjoy suddenly turns into something that keeps you up at night.

Your refuge becomes the place where you are constantly compared, judged, and evaluated — and somehow always falling short.

Why Am I Worse Than Other Musicians?

Your mind doesn't tend to compare you to people doing worse than you.

It doesn't wake up one day and suddenly decide to go: Oh, I'm doing better than this person, so I must be fine.

That part rarely shows up.

It always compares you to people who are ahead. More polished, more visible, further along in one way or another.

And it treats that as the reference point, as if that's the fair comparison.

This is actually just a normal part of human wiring. We're built to seek improvement and optimisation. We always want to make things better. It's how we discovered fire and managed to get out of caves in the first place.

(Although I'd argue singing around a fire probably wasn't as hard as doing an audition.)

But the thing is, the scale of comparison has changed.

Why Social Media Makes This So Much Worse

For most of human history, your comparison group was small.

The anthropologist Robin Dunbar (who studied this seriously enough that the number is now named after him) puts the size of a close-knit human group at around 150 people.

That's the upper limit of how many genuine social connections our brains evolved to handle.

Plus, of those 150, only a fraction would be around your age, doing something similar, working towards similar goals.

So you'd be comparing yourself to a handful of people. It was much easier to feel like a contributing member of your small circle.

Now it's… everyone.

Millions of musicians, in completely different systems, with different training, different timelines, different goals.

Your brain is trying to process all of it as though it's relevant data — running the same ancient comparison software it was running in a village of 150, but with the input cranked up several million times.

It isn't particularly well-equipped for this. We're not built for the times we're living in.

The Jazz Singer Who Wasn't a Jazz Singer

I worked with a classical singer in her 40s who would spend hours looking at other musicians online and come away feeling worse every single time. Not once would she leave an app inspired or motivated. Just… reduced.

At one point, she told me she'd been comparing herself to jazz singers.

She doesn't sing jazz. She doesn't listen to it. She doesn't even like it. And she's certainly not trying to work in that space.

But her brain had still decided this was relevant data.

(Confession: Mine does a similar thing with death metal singers, admiring those raw vocals and guttural effects, but I'm self-aware enough to know that'd never happen.)

That's how indiscriminate this process is.

It will use anything it can find to build a case that you're behind.

Why It Feels Like a Blow to Your Identity

The problem is, this isn't just uncomfortable. For a lot of musicians, it goes deeper than that.

Because being the musician has been part of your identity for a long time.

In your family, your school, your social circle... you were the one who did this.

And now you're in an environment where that label doesn't hold in the same way. Or at least, it doesn't feel like it does.

That's a huge blow to your identity. Feeling like the label you attach to yourself isn't as relevant, or as good, or as meaningful as it used to be.

That's not a small thing... in fact, for the more primitive survival part of our minds, it feels like threat.

Why You Feel Like the Worst Musician in the Room

I see this across very different stages:

Teenagers just entering conservatoires to musicians in their 40s and 50s who have been working for years.

The pattern is almost identical.

On the surface, it looks like a drop in confidence.

But underneath that, it's usually this constant comparison process gnawing away in the background.

Trying to work out where you stand. Trying to close the gap. Trying, in its own way, to get you to where you want to be.

It's just not doing it in a way that's particularly useful.

Because feeling worse about yourself doesn't reliably translate into better playing.

If anything, it tends to narrow things. You become more cautious. More self-aware in ways that don't help. Less willing to take risks musically.

Which is not usually what you were aiming for :)

The Stick, Not the Carrot

So when musicians say I've lost my love for music or it doesn't feel the same anymore, this is often part of what's sitting underneath it.

Nothing has gone wrong with you. Your brain is running a very ancient survival software in a context it wasn't built for.

If you're reading this, there's a very good chance you want to be the best musician you can be. You want to fulfil your potential. You want to reach the point where you feel like you're good enough.

This is your mind's way of trying to motivate you to do exactly that.

It's just approaching it from a backwards place — using the stick instead of the carrot. Making you feel bad about yourself, in the hope that the discomfort will push you to improve.

My approach is more like offering the carrot:

Giving you a reason to want to improve that isn't rooted in feeling small.

The goal of this isn't to stop comparison entirely — that'd not be realistic.

This is the work I do with musicians in private coaching. Looking at these patterns properly to work out when they're telling you something useful, and when to stop listening.

About

I'm Gökçe Kutsal, a performance coach for professional orchestra musicians and opera singers, with an MA in Voice Pedagogy and over 2,100 hours of coaching and teaching experience. I work with principals, titled positions, and audition candidates across Europe, the UK, North America, and Australia — and I write about performance anxiety, audition preparation, and the craft of practice for musicians who already have the technique and are trying to work out why it doesn't always hold up under pressure.

More about me | Ways to work together