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This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. They're on our TVs, on our phones, and on highway billboards. Flawless, airbrushed images of beautiful people living beautiful lives. Their complexions glow, their wealth seems effortless, and their children are always smiling. All of us are surrounded by these pictures of perfection.
Pictures that contrast all too starkly with our own complicated, messy lives. Social media platforms exacerbate this. Friends post pictures of their idyllic vacations. Colleagues announce promotions. A lot of people use the hashtag BLESSED. Meanwhile, divorces, demotions, and despair, or the challenges of making ends meet, these show up rarely or not at all.
What is the effect of the sharp contrast between the worlds we are shown and the worlds we ourselves inhabit? We may remind ourselves that what we are seeing has been airbrushed and filtered, but the contrast still burrows into our unconscious minds. Some researchers have argued that this contrast produces in us nagging feelings of inferiority, shame and resentment.
It causes us to feel we never have enough and to reach endlessly for the next ring, the next achievement, the next milestone. The costs of chasing perfection. This week on Hidden Brains. F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, describes the story of a man who desperately tried to climb the social ladder. The final lines of the novel are amongst the most famous in literature.
They read, Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter. Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. And one fine morning, so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
At the London School of Economics, psychologist Thomas Curran studies how many of us are modern versions of Jay Gatsby. He explores the psychological consequences of living in a culture that is obsessed with appearance and achievement. Thomas Curran, welcome to Hidden Brain.
Thank you for having me.
Thomas, you grew up in a working class family in a small town in England. And as a teenager, you were acutely aware of the social status of two friends, Kevin and Ian, and the contrast with your own family's means. Can you paint me a picture of what that was like?
Yeah, so my upbringing was one of love and support, but also material lack. We didn't have a great deal of money. And one of my earliest memories of that is going to school with the wrong backpack or the wrong pencil case, the wrong brand of sneakers. I didn't have gadgets like a Game Boy or a PlayStation. Phones were just coming in then. I didn't have one of those either.
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