One of the smaller aggravations of these politically vertiginous times is a kind of scolding that you tend to see on Twitter, especially from Americans keen to advertise their activist credentials. “If you’ve ever wondered what you’d have done in 1930s Germany, or during the civil rights movement,” they tweet, “congratulations: you’re doing it right now.”

My objection isn’t about whether it’s a good analogy. And I’m only slightly annoyed by the fact that their remarks are undermining, since what they’re doing right now, clearly, is sending sanctimonious tweets. As with most lecturing via social media, I assume they do it to make themselves feel better; sending the tweet feels like they’ve done their bit for the day.

But my real gripe is that I’m almost certain such exhortations make people less likely to take constructive action. It’s the sort of message that makes you feel as if the only response to a crisis (Trump, climate change… take your pick) is to quit your job and dedicate your life, and life savings, to the cause. Or at least to spend all of your free time on it. Suddenly, whatever little thing you might have actually done – a small donation here, a protest march or petition-signing there – seems so pathetic as to be worthless. So you end up doing less, in response to a serious situation, than if you hadn’t been persuaded it was so serious.

A more useful message, though it lacks the drama of the original, would be to “choose the right counterfactual”. In other words, compare your actions with what you otherwise might have done – not some ideal world in which you became Mahatma Gandhi. If the real choice is between a small action and nothing, that small action is far from pathetic. (You’ll need to be honest with yourself, though: if you genuinely might quit your job, perhaps you should.) This logic applies beyond political action, of course. One common cause of procrastination on major projects of all types is the feeling that working on them for just a few minutes per day, or per week, “wouldn’t be enough”. But if the only viable alternative is working on them for zero minutes per day, that objection is meaningless: you’re using a definition of “enough” that means you’ll never do anything at all.

There’s a parallel here to “social comparison theory”, which explains how we make ourselves miserable through “upward comparison” with people wealthier or more accomplished than us. (That’s why flying first class on Cathay Pacific is such a bummer: once you’ve reached that level of luxury, you’re moving in circles where half your friends have private jets.)

But we fall into the same trap even when nobody else is involved. We contrast our actions with a perfect version of ourselves – an especially brutal form of upward comparison, since there’s no limit to what you can imagine yourself doing, and thus no real-world outcome that could ever measure up. Instead, compare downwards. Don’t dwell on what you might have done, ideally, in 1930s Germany. Ask what you might have done today, if this issue had never arisen. And then make sure you do at least a little more than that.

Listen to this

The historian Lyndsey Stonebridge explores Hannah Arendt’s wisdom on thinking for yourself in dark times, in an episode of the On Being podcast

oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com.