Young people face a dual crisis: economic hardship and a psychological barrage from social media's curated success. This creates a "shame economy," where constant notifications of others' fake wealth intensify feelings of failure, loneliness, and anxiety more than any other societal factor.

While technology enriches the world on an absolute basis (e.g., flight, internet), it also dramatically expands our "comparison set" via social media. This paradox means that seeing others' seemingly better lives can make individuals feel more miserable, despite their own improved conditions.

While technology improves life on an absolute basis, it paradoxically increases feelings of inadequacy. Social media exposes everyone to the lifestyles of the ultra-wealthy, shifting our happiness benchmark from local peers to a global elite and fueling relative dissatisfaction despite objective progress.

We judge ourselves based on our chaotic, unfiltered internal monologue while judging others by their curated external presentation. This massive data imbalance fosters the false belief that we are uniquely strange or broken, damaging our self-esteem.

On platforms like Instagram, you follow specialists: an interior designer, a fitness guru, a CEO. Your brain combines these separate expertises into a single, impossible standard for yourself, leading to feelings of inadequacy because you're not an expert in every domain simultaneously.

While wage data may contradict a crisis, people feel poorer because happiness equals prosperity minus expectations. Social media massively inflates expectations by normalizing the lifestyle of the top 0.1%, causing widespread feelings of financial failure.

A major source of modern anxiety is the tendency to benchmark one's life against a minuscule fraction of outliers—the world's most famous and wealthy people. This creates a distorted view of success. Shifting focus to the vast majority of humanity provides a healthier perspective.

We become envious of a curated, 1% version of someone's life. A stricter criterion for envy requires considering their entire reality—the daily grind, stress, and trade-offs. If you're unwilling to accept their 'war,' don't covet their 'wins'.

Humans learn what to want by observing others (mimetic desire). Social media expands our 'comparison set' to the entire world's curated highlights, creating a recipe for discontent. The solution is to be highly intentional about who you compare yourself to, carefully curating your inputs to align with your actual values and well-being.