The Vanishing Circle
How social media collapsed the small, forgiving world we used to compare ourselves against and replaced it with an arena of strangers.
Growing up in the 1980s, my social world was more or less defined by my ZIP code, a bunch of neighborhood kids, the lunchroom table, and a roster of teammates - these were the people you knew and grew up with. You knew where they came from, what their parents did, which ones had it easier, and which ones had it harder. This meant that when a friend achieved something before you did, the achievement landed softly because you had seen the whole journey.1
That world, apparently, is gone. In its place is something that looks like a connection but functions more like a scoreboard - a permanent, algorithmically curated exhibition of other people’s highlights, stripped of all the context that would make those highlights make sense.
The Small Circle and Its Quiet Mercy
The genius of the small social circle was never discussed, because it never needed to be. It simply was. Nobody was performing for an audience, because there was no audience to perform for. There was just a group of people living in rough proximity, accumulating experiences at roughly similar rates, visible to each other in all of their ordinariness.
Comparison happened, of course, it always does. But it happened with full information and understanding. It was contextual and cultural – some friends got their license and a car when they turned sixteen. When your classmate made first chair clarinet, you watched her practice every single day for three years. You may have felt some envy, but the envy was quickly dissolved by context. The achievement was explicable. It had a story, and you knew that story, because it had unfolded alongside your own.
This is not nostalgia for an idealized past. Small circles had their own cruelties: exclusion, gossip, that particular brand of brutality of adolescent hierarchies. But they also had a built-in ceiling on comparison pressure. You could only compare yourself to the people you actually knew, and knowing them fully was a kind of protection. Their success did not feel like an indictment of your failure, because you understood that success as the product of circumstances you could trace.
The Arena Gets Filled
Social media did not simply expand the circle; it obliterated it. What replaced the small, knowable group was something closer to an arena filled with strangers, millions of them, all broadcasting their greatest achievements, carefully arranged and hashtagged by platforms, specifically designed to surface the most attention-generating content. And attention, it turns out, is most reliably generated by apparent success. (The only exception is unmitigated failure.)
The result is an environment in which a nineteen-year-old sees a peer - or what appears to be a peer - launching a company, buying a house, publishing a book, or announcing an engagement. The content arrives without a backstory. There is no childhood to reference, no family financial situation to understand, no long, slow arc of work that explains how this person arrived at this moment. The achievement simply appears, fully formed, like something conjured.
“We don’t know their backstory. We don’t see how they developed alongside us. So their success feels magical, and magic has a way of making us feel ordinary by comparison.”
When we cannot explain an achievement through ordinary means, we tend to explain it through extraordinary ones. We attribute to strangers on the internet qualities we have decided we lack: discipline, intelligence, ambition, talent, and courage. Their success becomes evidence of our deficiency. The achievement seems magical precisely because we have no access to the grinding, unglamorous, very-human process that produced it. Research confirms this: passive scrolling, the dominant mode of social media consumption, consistently produces upward social comparison and envy at far higher rates than active, reciprocal engagement.2
The Life Cycle Event Problem
Nowhere is this more damaging than around what sociologists call life cycle events: the recognized milestones of a human life. Marriage. Children. Career breakthroughs. Home ownership. Advanced degrees. These events have always carried social weight, but that weight was once distributed across a small enough group that individual timing differences felt manageable. If your college roommate got married two years before you, it was one data point. You knew them. You understood their relationship because you were there as it developed.
Now those events are broadcast at industrial scale. A person who is 28 and unmarried does not simply notice that one or two friends have wed; they are served a continuous feed of engagements, weddings, and anniversary posts from hundreds of people, many of them strangers, many of them younger. The signal is not one data point; rather, it is a relentless statistical argument that they are behind. And because the strangers on screen are strangers, there is no counter-narrative. No “well, I know her situation, and I know why that worked out the way it did.” Just the evidence, uncontextualized, repeating.3
This creates a form of anxiety that is genuinely new in human history—not the anxiety of being judged by people who know you, but the anxiety of being judged by a standard assembled from people who don’t. The benchmark is not a person. It is a composite hallucination, built from thousands of best-moments posts, that no actual human being has ever lived up to or ever could.
What We Lost When We Lost the Circle
The deepest loss is not confidence, though that is real. It is not mental health, though the data on that is damning.4 The deepest loss is the ability to understand one’s own life as a coherent, internally-motivated narrative.
In the small-circle world, you developed by following who you were while adhering to basic “rules” of your social group. However, you were key in creating those rules, so acceptance without angst may have been part of the experience. Your trajectory was, essentially, yours. You made decisions about school, work, relationships, and creativity based on your own sense of direction, checked occasionally against the people you trusted. The feedback loop was tight and meaningful because it came from people who actually knew you.
Today, the feedback loop has been replaced by the scroll. Young people make decisions (or more precisely, freeze in the face of decisions) with one eye permanently on a feed that tells them what the people they don’t know are doing instead. The question is no longer “what is right for me?” It is “Am I keeping up?” And that is a question that cannot be answered, because the standard keeps shifting and the people setting it are strangers who will never know your name
“The question is no longer ‘what is right for me?’ It has become ‘am I keeping up?’ - a question that cannot be answered, because the standard keeps shifting and the people setting it will never know your name.”
The solution is not simple, and it is not merely a matter of putting the phone down. The comparison instinct is deep and social; it exists because it once served us. What it needs is not suppression, but recalibration. It needs to be reattached to people we actually know, timelines we can actually trace, and achievements we can actually understand in their full, imperfect, very ordinary context. How we get back to that is another problem. Making friends, earning and giving trust, and thinking for oneself. These are all social and cultural cues that may need to be reestablished before too long.
The small circle was not perfect. But it was real. And reality, with all of its inconvenient backstory and explainable success and visible struggle, is the only antidote to a world of strangers performing magic on a screen.
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ENDNOTES
1. Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations, 7(2), 117–140. https://doi.org/10.1177/001872675400700202
2. Meier, A., & Krause, H.-V. (2023). Does passive social media use harm well-being? An adversarial review.Journal of Media Psychology: Theories, Methods, and Applications, 35(3), 169–180. https://doi.org/10.1027/1864-1105/a000358
3. O’Connell, R., & Daruwala, N. A. (2025). Milestones and mindsets: How social media shapes young adults’ expectations and emotional well-being. Journal of Social Media Research, 2(5), 400–415. https://doi.org/10.29329/jsomer.56
4. Twenge, J. M., Joiner, T. E., Rogers, M. L., & Martin, G. N. (2018). Increases in depressive symptoms, suicide-related outcomes, and suicide rates among U.S. adolescents after 2010 and links to increased new media screen time. Clinical Psychological Science, 6(1), 3–17. https://doi.org/10.1177/2167702617723376
FOR FURTHER READING ON THIS TOPIC:
Bloemen, N., & De Coninck, D. (2020). Social media and fear of missing out in adolescents: The role of family characteristics. Social Media + Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120965517
Burnell, K., Trekels, J., Prinstein, M. J., & Telzer, E. H. (2024). Adolescents’ Social Comparison on Social Media: Links with Momentary Self-Evaluations. Affective science, 5(4), 295–299. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-024-00240-6
Chen Y-H (2025) A comparative study of state self-esteem responses to social media feedback loops in adolescents and adults. Frontiers in Psychology, 16:1625771. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1625771
Faelens, Lien & Hoorelbeke, Kristof & Cambier, Ruben & van Put, Jill & Van de putte, Eowyn & De Raedt, Rudi & Koster, Ernst. (2021). The relationship between Instagram use and indicators of mental health: A systematic review. Computers in Human Behavior Reports. 4. 100121. 10.1016/j.chbr.2021.100121.
Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations, 7(2), 117–140. https://doi.org/10.1177/001872675400700202
Hunt, M. G., et al. (2018). No more FOMO: Limiting social media decreases loneliness and depression. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 37(10), 751–768. https://doi.org/10.1521/jscp.2018.37.10.751
Irmer, A., Schmiedek, F. (2023). Associations between youth’s daily social media use and well-being are mediated by upward comparisons. Commun Psychology 1, 12 https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-023-00013-0
Lup, K., Trub, L., & Rosenthal, L. (2015). Instagram #instasad? Exploring associations among Instagram use, depressive symptoms, body image dissatisfaction, and perceived social support. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 18(5), 247–252.
Meier, A., & Krause, H.-V. (2023). Does passive social media use harm well-being? An adversarial review.Journal of Media Psychology: Theories, Methods, and Applications, 35(3), 169–180. https://doi.org/10.1027/1864-1105/a000358
O’Connell, R., & Daruwala, N. A. (2025). Milestones and mindsets: How social media shapes young adults’ expectations and emotional well-being. Journal of Social Media Research, 2(5), 400–415. https://doi.org/10.29329/jsomer.56
Przybylski, A. K., et al. (2013). Motivational, emotional, and behavioral correlates of fear of missing out. Computers in Human Behavior, 29(4), 1841–1848.
Shannon, H., et al. (2022). Problematic social media use in adolescents and young adults: Systematic review and meta-analysis. JMIR Mental Health. https://doi.org/10.2196/33450
Twenge, J. M., et al. (2018). Increases in depressive symptoms, suicide-related outcomes, and suicide rates among U.S. adolescents after 2010. Clinical Psychological Science, 6(1), 3–17. https://doi.org/10.1177/2167702617723376
Twenge, J. M. (2020). Increases in depression, self-harm, and suicide among U.S. adolescents after 2012 and links to technology use. Psychiatric Research and Clinical Practice. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.prcp.20190015
Valkenburg, P. M., et al. (2021). Social media use and adolescents’ self-esteem: Heading for a person-specific media effects paradigm. Journal of Communication, 71(1), 56–78. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqaa017
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