During this livestream with
, a thought resurfaced in my mind.How much does social media fuel envy?
Young people are actually doing well, financially speaking, but many have outsized expectations for themselves.
The lifestyles you’re exposed to shape your sense of what’s normal or achievable. When I was a kid, a popular show was MTV Cribs. You’d watch Ludacris show off his mansion in Malibu and think, “Wow, that’s so cool.” Sure, there might have been a little envy, but Ludacris is a world-renowned hip-hop artist—a star—so it made sense that he’d have a mansion like that. You didn’t compare yourself to him because his success felt like a world away.
But today, it’s different. Young people are seeing people who don’t seem all that different from themselves win the social media lottery. Imagine you’re 22 or 23, just out of college, and scrolling through Instagram. You see someone your age who looks like you and has a similar level of intelligence or talent (maybe the person has no talent at all), but they’re making a living as an influencer. They have a few hundred thousand or a million followers and they’re earning money simply by being themselves, landing sponsorships and ad deals.
That kind of exposure can activate envy. Young people might think, “Why not me? Why can’t I have that kind of job?” It’s one thing to see Ludacris living a glamorous life—that feels understandable and unattainable—but seeing someone so similar to yourself succeeding in a way that looks effortless can feel deeply unfair, especially if you’re struggling in your own career.
This is because similarity is one of the strongest predictors of whether you envy someone. The people you envy are those that you could imagine yourself being. The key components are similarity, and achievement in a domain that is relevant to yourself. So if you want to be an influencer, and you see someone of roughly your same age, sex, education level, attractiveness, and so on achieve the ability to earn a living online, you will feel more envy than if it is someone very different from yourself, someone who comes from a completely different background than you.