Relatively Terrible
Explanation
The Joke
A person observes that "everyone seems so anxious and angry these days" and presents a thought experiment to explain why. As an early human, you might meet 150 people in your lifetime. If you encounter 75 who are better than you, you are doing fine statistically. Even meeting 114 people better than you only makes you the worst in your small group -- still manageable. But fast-forward 100,000 years: with the same brain but modern connectivity (the internet), you now encounter 14 people better than you every single hour. The person asks how this makes you feel. The response: "I am going to destroy the internet." But even that aspiration is undercut: "Ech, someone else would do it better."
The Humor
The comic takes a genuinely insightful psychological observation and rides it to a darkly funny conclusion. The core idea is that the human brain evolved for small social groups (Dunbar's number of roughly 150 people), and our self-assessment mechanisms were calibrated for that scale. The internet has shattered this by exposing us to millions of people, meaning we constantly encounter individuals who are more talented, more attractive, or more successful -- at a rate our brains were never designed to handle. This creates chronic feelings of inadequacy. The punchline works on two levels: the urge to destroy the internet as a solution to social comparison anxiety, and the immediate self-defeating thought that someone else would even do the destroying better. The comic illustrates its own thesis in its own punchline.
References
The comic references Dunbar's number, the theoretical cognitive limit to the number of stable social relationships a person can maintain, proposed by anthropologist Robin Dunbar as roughly 150. The concept of social comparison theory, originally proposed by Leon Festinger in 1954, is also relevant -- the idea that people evaluate themselves by comparing to others, and that upward comparisons can decrease self-esteem.