Gemma Spake

We don't see the tough bits unless they want us to see it.

We only see the people who have broken through a very tricky algorithm to reach our screen or to reach our public knowledge or the public arena.

And this creates a cognitive fallacy that if these are the only people we see online, everybody else must know.

Like, it must be accessible.

These people were just like us before they got here.

And everybody could have this, so why don't we?

In a more professional context as well, I think LinkedIn has done that for even more traditional career paths as well.

Obviously, not everybody wants to be an influencer or a YouTuber.

But LinkedIn does that for finance, for consulting, for law, for accounting.

There was a 2016 study that assessed a sample of 1,700 university students and measured the correlation between LinkedIn usage and depression and social anxiety.

And they found that participants who used LinkedIn at least once per week were much more likely to have depression.

These like indicators of poor mental health.

And that's the problem with constantly striving to be extraordinary at this age.

Extraordinary feels exceedingly normal because of how cases of extraordinary people are everywhere and rise to the surface and dominate what we see because it's exciting.

It's exciting and alluring to see somebody make it.

And this, of course, breeds a very deep, insidious form of social comparison.

I should say this, social comparison in itself is not a bad thing.

I actually think it's a useful thing.

It's completely normal to look around you and to look at others for like information about what you should be doing and how you think and how you feel and how you should behave.

It provides an incredible evolutionary advantage in a highly complex and interconnected modern social world.