Let’s look at what can happen in this process. First, you see a influencer on holiday by the sea. Then someone who has bought an apartment. Then an influencer with a new car. Then an entrepreneur talking about earning €20,000 a month. Ten minutes later, you are no longer thinking about their lives. You are thinking about your own.
When did following other people become a way of evaluating ourselves?
That is why the question is not simply why we sometimes feel envious of people on social media. The more interesting question is:
why do the lives of people we often do not even know become a benchmark for our own lives?
We No Longer Compare Ourselves Only to People, but to Their Stories
When a friend posts a photo from a trip, a simple comparison may arise: They travel, I don't. With an influencer, the comparison expands: She is beautiful, successful, free and happy, while I am not. With an entrepreneur or online “guru,” it might sound like this: They already know how to make money, while I still don't.
In all these cases, however, we are not comparing ourselves only to the person.
We are comparing ourselves to the story their public presence represents: a story about wealth, beauty, productivity, freedom, travel or the “right” way to live.
This does not necessarily mean that creators are deliberately misleading us. It simply means that their public image is not the same as their entire life. When we follow someone, we often do not know what their ordinary day looks like, how much their content costs to produce, how many projects have failed, what their relationships are like or how they actually feel.
We mainly know the carefully selected public version of their life. Social media makes precisely this possible: selecting, editing and highlighting successes and attractive moments. [1]
That is why it is not fair to compare our entire, unedited reality with another person's public highlights. And yet, such comparison is deeply human. Research on social comparison on social media shows associations between upward comparison, envy and poorer well-being, although responses vary considerably between individuals and circumstances.[1,2]
Why Do We Watch Them in the First Place?
The answer is not simply that we are curious or that we want to make ourselves feel bad. Human beings are highly sensitive to social information. We are interested in questions such as: What are other people doing? What is desirable? What counts as success today? How do people who are doing well live? Where do I fit in?
Social media satisfies our need for connection, for keeping track of our social circles, and for orienting ourselves in the world. Research on the motivations behind Facebook use includes social connection, shared identities, keeping track of people within our networks, and exploring the social world.[3] A psychological review of digital media likewise emphasizes that motives related to connection and status play an important role in how we observe others, present ourselves, and respond to social feedback.[4]
We don't watch others simply to see them. Often, we also watch to figure out who we are supposed to be.
In the past, we mostly compared ourselves with classmates, coworkers, neighbors, or friends. Today, in a single evening, we can move from a friend's holiday to a fitness model, from a successful entrepreneur to a creator promising financial freedom in three simple steps. It is not necessarily the individual post that is harmful. What changes is the environment in which we are exposed to so many different standards of success, one after another.
Why Does It Seem Like Everyone Is Doing It?
If you see twenty people in a single day talking about earning €10,000 a month, passive income, AI businesses, dropshipping, personal branding, or a “six-figure business,” you can quickly get the impression:
Apparently, everyone is doing this. In reality, you may simply be seeing a selected sample of people who publicly talk about it.
This is an example of
selection bias: what is visible is not necessarily typical. People who have succeeded, or those who use success stories to sell a product, service, or their personal brand, have more reasons to share those stories publicly.
The experiences of people who did not achieve the advertised results, or who simply do not want to talk about money, are less visible in the stream of posts. Therefore, the frequency of such stories is not the same as evidence that this level of success is common.
When Envy Turns Into a Feeling That We Are Missing Out on Life
When it comes to travel, success, and money, envy is often intertwined with
FOMO (fear of missing out). FOMO is the feeling that other people are having rewarding experiences from which we are excluded, accompanied by a desire to stay constantly up to date with what others are doing.[5]
Envy says: “I want that too.” FOMO adds a sense of urgency: “If I don't experience this now, I'll be left out of life.” Social comparison asks: “How am I doing compared with them?”
This helps explain why content about making money quickly, travelling, or achieving perfect productivity does not merely interest us—it can also make us anxious. It does not simply show us something we might want. It can create the impression that there is a deadline by which we should have already achieved it.
Why Do Similar Types of Content Keep Coming Back?
This is where the algorithm comes in. More precisely, recommendation systems that rank and suggest content in our feeds, Reels, the Explore tab, and elsewhere. These systems consider several types of signals when selecting content, including characteristics of a post, how other people respond to it, and our previous activity around similar content.
If we linger on a video about making money quickly, watch it, share it, or search for similar topics, this can become one of the signals indicating that we may be interested in this type of content. The system may then show us more similar recommendations. This does not mean that a single view necessarily triggers a precisely defined sequence of videos, nor that the platform itself creates our desire for money or success.
It is a feedback loop: we show attention, the system adapts, similar content appears more frequently, and we then choose again how much attention we give it.[4,6]
That is why it is not entirely accurate to say that social media is “brainwashing” us. A more useful explanation is that media, influencers, and recommendation systems do not simply tell us what to watch. Together with our own choices, they help create an environment in which certain images of success appear more frequently. What we see often can start to feel more normal, more desirable, and more expected.
This applies to images of the ideal body, a luxurious lifestyle, travel, constant productivity, and rapid entrepreneurial success. Such images are not necessarily wrong.
The problem arises when we take them as the complete and obligatory standard of what a successful life should look like.
Not so simply. Research does not support the claim that Facebook, Instagram, or algorithms themselves cause depression. The effects of social comparison depend on the individual and the circumstances, and the relationship can also work in the opposite direction: people who are already feeling worse may be more sensitive to painful comparisons. A meta-analysis of 141 studies likewise found that most associations between active or passive social media use and indicators of well-being were small.[7]
The more important question, therefore, is not: Am I looking? But rather: What am I looking at, why am I looking at it, and how do I feel afterwards?
Perhaps We Don't Envy the Person, but the Life They Represent
The most useful response to envy is not necessarily to delete the app. We can first ask ourselves:
Do I really envy this person, or do I envy what their post represents to me?
Maybe we don't actually want Santorini. Maybe we want rest. We don't necessarily want a million-euro business. Perhaps we want greater financial security or the feeling that our work matters. We may not envy the influencer at all. Maybe what we long for is more freedom, confidence, or time for ourselves.
When we translate the desire into something more specific, comparison can shift from a judgment about our worth into information about the direction we want to take. This might mean taking a small, achievable step: planning a weekend away, saving for a trip, having a conversation about our career, learning a specific skill, or spending less time consuming content that repeatedly makes us feel inadequate.
Sometimes another person's story can also be a useful model—not as a measure of our worth, but as evidence that a particular possibility is genuinely achievable. This is
aspirational comparison: a moment when we don't look at someone else and think, “Because of them, I am less worthy,” but instead, “This shows me what might also be possible for me.”
Social media does not give us a definitive answer about how we should live. It offers us countless images of life—some real, others selective, and all incomplete. Once we understand this, we can still follow others with curiosity without treating every story they share as evidence that something is missing from our own lives.
Sources:
[1] Carraturo et al. (2023): Envy, Social Comparison, and Depression on Social Networking Sites: A Systematic Review
[2] Meier & Johnson (2022): Social Comparison and Envy on Social Media: A Critical Review
[3] Joinson (2008): Looking at, Looking Up or Keeping Up with People? Motives and Use of Facebook
[4] Metzler & Garcia (2023): Social Drivers and Algorithmic Mechanisms on Digital Media
[5] Gupta & Sharma (2021): Fear of Missing Out: A Brief Overview of Origin, Theoretical Underpinnings and Relationship with Mental Health
[6] Meta Transparency Center: Our Approach to Explaining Ranking
[7] Godard & Holtzman (2024): Are Active and Passive Social Media Use Related to Mental Health, Wellbeing, and Social Support Outcomes? A Meta-Analysis of 141 Studies