The Perils of an Enormous Social World

Living in an interconnected world of 8 billion people can sometimes be wondrous. But it also poses severe social risks, as we now compare ourselves globally rather than locally.

An announcement to the fine people of Britain! My book—FLUKE: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters—is out *today* in all good bookshops and online retailers. You can read a profile of me—and the book—in The New Statesman or this adapted piece I wrote for The Guardian. FLUKE is out globally, so please do check it out.

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For most of the history of our species, almost every human was the best at something.

I don’t mean that as some participation trophy consolation message to our long-dead ancestors. Rather, I mean that the human social world was drastically smaller, usually comprised of a few dozen to a few hundred individuals, who lived in roving bands of hunter-gatherers, where social comparison often made us feel better.

As a result, those who were mediocre or even below average globally could be exceptional locally. If you were pretty good at hunting, there’s a good chance you’d be the best hunter anyone knew. Maybe someone two hundred miles away was better than you, but you were oblivious to their existence, so it didn’t matter to you or those around you.

Now, we’ve concocted a world where such exemplary social recognition is a pipe dream. It is true that someone, somewhere in the world is the best at, say, shearing sheep. Today, there is someone, somewhere, who will produce the loudest burp anywhere in the world, or will perform the world’s most selfless random act of kindness.

There are still absolutes on the extremes of humanity. But the odds of being that best person are now one in eight billion. Even when someone is the best, they rarely realize it (outside of, say, the Olympics). And the odds of being socially recognized as the best have shrunk to vanishing rarity.

These dynamics, for good or ill, are artefacts of an ever-larger world of social comparison. The history of humanity is partly defined by moving from hyper-local communities to hyper-global ones. Each of us inhabits, to borrow the phrase from the historian Benedict Anderson, an “imagined community.”

I feel American, but I likely have more values in common with a nerd in Mongolia than with a bigot in Alabama. I feel Minnesotan, but I haven’t lived there for twelve years and I have never met most of the other five million Minnesotans out there. And yet, I still read the Minneapolis Star Tribune every day and cheer for my hometown sports teams. Identity is now only loosely tied to geographic proximity.

The expanding social onion

Our worlds of social comparison are like an onion, with expanding circles of closeness, radiating in layered circles from our family outward. But the key difference between every other period in history and our own era is that part of our social onions have now grown so large as to include the entire world.

This shift—from local to global communities—was caused by rapidly changing information pipelines. We begin to feel part of broader identities when we share information with another set of people.

Mass media is a key reason why Americans are more likely to be patriotic than statriotic. Previously, it was harder to feel a visceral sense of community identity when you only got word from people hundreds of miles away every few weeks, or, sometimes, if a border was involved, never at all.

Now, through social media and the internet, people in Togo or Cambodia can instantly laugh with delight at the joy of a certain Francis Bourgeois, a social media star known exclusively for the infectious euphoria he experiences when he sees a train.¹ 20,000 of you are reading this in every area of the globe, our brains brought together instantly without regard to time or space.

In 1942, the sociologist Herbert Hyman put this shift into a theory, noting that humans have variable expectations of their conception of self, depending on the reference category that they use for comparison. A decade later, Leon Festinger solidified these ideas more formally with social comparison theory.

Later, sociologists noted that there were upward social comparisons (in which we look at those who we think are better than us and either feel bad or strive to be better) and downward social comparisons, in which we look at those who are worse off than us, and often feel comforted. (Cancer patients experiencing horrific symptoms may feel grateful if they end up beating the odds, because their universe of comparison isn’t everyone in the world who’s healthy, but all other cancer patients).

These ideas are related to the concept of horizontal inequality, in which some of the richest people on Earth can somehow internalize a feeling of being comparatively poor, simply because their friends are richer than they are.

Similarly, the frog pond effect refers to how we tend to evaluate ourselves negatively when we are immersed within a group of high-performing individuals. (I see this all the time in my students, who are objectively some of the highest performing students in the world, though some feel intense despair and a sense of being a failure because they didn’t get the top internship while one of their friends did).

The risks of constant, global social comparison

Modern social comparison isn’t just larger; it’s also constant. We are bombarded by unceasing reminders of where we stand not just on economic hierarchies, but social ones. We may look our best, only to see someone who looks better online, creating standards of comparison that are unattainable, elusive, and often, depressing.

Some of us are more immune to the despair of constant social comparison than others. But for a large chunk of the population, notably teenage girls, evidence is mounting that there is a terrible cost to the endless bombardment of global comparisons. And even when the reference category isn’t global, many teenagers experience pressure to document every moment, an attempt to cram their lives into that which fits in a TikTok post. It is an existence defined, increasingly, by “content.”

The American social psychologist

Jonathan Haidt

is one of the leading researchers into the role of social media on teenage mental health. He notes that the simplistic knee-jerk reaction insisting that a teenage girl would be better off being completely unplugged from Instagram or TikTok isn’t so clear-cut, so long as her friends continue to inject those videos, trends, and memes straight into their social veins. By leaving social media, a modern girl could feel isolated and left out even though the overall experience of social media creates significant harm for the entire group. This creates a paradox that Haidt highlights here:

…Social media creates a cohort effect: something that happened to a whole cohort of young people, including those who don’t use social media. It also creates a trap—a collective action problem—for girls and for parents. Each girl might be worse off quitting Instagram even though all girls would be better off if everyone quit.

Jonathan Haidt

has compiled an enormous review of the available research on these questions, which you can evaluate for yourself if you’re interested more in this topic. There are nuances and caveats, which he highlights clearly in the compilation. (Some have challenged his conclusions).

But many of the correlations are striking, not just for the relationships they show, but also because there’s an asymmetry by gender that shows up again and again in the data. Here, for example, is a graph linking the amount of time spent on social media with levels of depression, in ways that are far worse for teen girls.

In his research, Haidt highlights three recurrent dynamics in these studies:

1. The rates of mood disorders are higher for girls than boys.

2. The lines are curved: moderate users are often no worse off than non-users, but as we move into heavy use, the lines rise more quickly. 

3. The dose-response effect is larger for girls. For boys, moving from 0 to 5 hours of daily use is associated with a doubling of depression rates. For girls, it’s associated with a tripling. 

Moreover, Haidt has showcased how this problem has become far more acute with the rise of social media—and the constant, global nature of inescapable social comparison. He included this chart in his briefing documents for his testimony before the United States Congress, and it’s impossible to not be jarred by the nearly vertical lines that emerge right as social media becomes an inescapable part of life for young people. This, for example, shows sharply rising self-harm rates for children and teens:

Clearly, something is shifting—and rapidly. Haidt’s hypothesis is that social media is to blame and, personally, I find that hypothesis convincing (even as I’m generally skeptical of monocausal explanations for complex social phenomena).

Moreover, beyond teenagers, all of us who use social media have been walloped with an endless supply of metrics to define our lives. How many views did that post generate? How many followers do you have? How many likes? What about that comment from the random jerk that stuck in your mind for days afterward? We’ve allowed our minds to be hijacked, with increasing regularity, by an impersonal social sphere that’s too large for many of us to cope with.

How to live within history’s biggest social onion

There are, however, some benefits to an expanding social onion—and it includes a sense of intertwined connection with people you will never meet. That can amplify our capacity for empathy beyond our immediate surroundings. As the moral philosopher Peter Singer argues, and I noted in Corruptible:

…the history of our species has been defined by an expanding “moral circle.” People used to care only about people immediately around them. Now, we can be deeply moved by stories of a tsunami or a terrorist attack halfway around the world with people we’ll never meet or know.

The onion isn’t going back to its original size. We will never live as hunter-gatherers again (barring a cataclysm beyond our wildest imaginings). So, rather than trying to shrink the social onion, perhaps it’s best to ensure that it doesn’t make us cry so often.

The teen mental health crisis is a topic beyond my expertise. I’ll leave that to experts such as Haidt to tackle, with informed research.

But what I can offer are my philosophical reflections on my own experience, in which I live in a social world in which people who I will never meet hate me for my political viewpoints, sending me weird abuse and strange threats because I criticize Donald Trump on the airwaves or in print. That experience, of instant uncharitable feedback from everywhere, produces a visceral feeling of being part of a global social onion (and I note that it’s far worse for women and minorities who engage in public discourse).

But in the process, that experience has given me so much more of an appreciation for the inner layers of the onion, because those are the people who matter to us most. Our culture regularly promotes the mentality that one can use the yardstick of social exposure as a metric for success. Visibility becomes a goal, as does “reach” (a terrible dystopian word that I hate). By fluke, I’ve been able to “reach” many people, which is why I’ve landed in your inbox.

Paradoxically, living in that enormous online world can be intensely isolating, in which you risk falling into the trap (I have previously) of mistaking the likes and the clicks as a sort of replacement for genuine social community. What I’ve learned is this: if we’re not careful, the more we turn our self validation over to global communities, the emptier our local lives can feel.

Many people have wisely avoided that trap. But millions have fallen into it, and the reverberating effects can range from social despair and isolation to the more destructive forces of people searching for membership of new extremist digital communities, whether it be a political movement that can fuse with your identity (such as MAGA in the United States) or even conspiracist subgroups, such as QAnon. When belonging and social recognition plummet in our immediate surroundings, some will turn to the false prophets produced by digital cutouts of those feelings.

A core political challenge of the 21st century is how to take a world that increasingly operates online and nonetheless build social structures that produce a resurgence of local community. Our avatars may stretch across borders, but our own lives still unfold in small geographic spaces, and that’s where real life—producing the most fulfilling moments—is lived.

My hope is that the pendulum of digital innovation and the unbridled enthusiasm for it will swing back slightly, allowing us to recognize that just because we can live mostly online, maybe we shouldn’t. (Full disclosure: I say this as someone who is pretty addicted to my phone and still struggles to spend less time online).

But, as we all struggle to navigate a hybrid reality, I hope we can at least acknowledge that some of the implications of constant, globalized social comparisons are worth resisting. And we should never allow ourselves to succumb to the perils of defining our lives according to arbitrary benchmarks in which we allow our self-perceptions to be swayed by influencers and idiots (but I repeat myself).

Nonetheless, I am delighted that you are all a loose part of my social onion, and that I am privileged to be a small part of yours.

May you always feel like a valued frog in your own social pond.

Thank you for reading The Garden of Forking Paths. If you value my research and writing, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription or ordering my new book—hot off the presses!—FLUKE: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters.

1. I saw Francis Bourgeois in central London a month ago while waiting for the Tube. He was not looking euphoric, but he is more into trains than the tube, so it was understandable. As a side note in keeping with this article, I perceived him looking intensely anxious as he scanned the platform, aware that many people, including myself, had clearly recognized him.