By Nikola Spasov

Much has been written about the negative impact of social media. We hear about phone addiction, declining attention spans, the need for constant validation, hate speech, fake news…

All of these problems are real, but there is another mechanism that has an enormous impact on the way we experience our own lives today.

The fact is this.

The frequency with which something appears on our screen is not the same as the frequency with which it exists in reality, but our brain does not distinguish between the two. In this way, social media changes our perception of statistical reality.

Here are a few simple examples. Someone lost 50 kilograms in six months. The story may be completely true. Another person built a company worth millions at the age of 22, which may also be entirely possible. A third, at 28, already owns several apartments, travels the world and says they have achieved financial independence.

The problem is not that these stories are false. The problem is that they are exceptions, while the information system through which we consume information today presents the exception to us as the rule.

This is where one of the greatest deceptions of the modern information environment takes place, even though no one in particular necessarily has to lie to us.

In real life, outcomes tend to follow some kind of normal distribution. If ten thousand people start exercising and paying attention to their diet, the vast majority will achieve moderate results. Some will lose five kilograms, others ten, some will give up, while a small number will undergo a spectacular transformation. But it is precisely those few spectacular cases that we are most likely to see.

The more unusual something is in real life, the more visible social media makes it.

This is hardly a new discovery. Even before social media, “man bites dog” would be news, while “dog bites man” would not. But the impact of such a story before social media cannot be compared with its impact today. Constant exposure to such stories with every scroll is the key problem.

The psychology is simple. If we see something often enough, we begin to feel that it is common. By the same principle that a lie repeated a hundred times becomes truth, an exception repeated a hundred times becomes the rule.

If every day we see twenty-something millionaires, perfect bodies, extraordinary careers, exotic travel and people who have transformed their lives in six months, our brains gradually shift the reference point for what we consider normal.

Before social media, people had a much more limited reference group. They mostly compared themselves with family, friends, colleagues, neighbours and people in their immediate surroundings. Of course, famous, wealthy and extraordinarily successful people existed, but they were clearly categorized as exceptional. Nobody looked at Michael Jordan and became depressed because they could not play basketball like him. Culture itself told us that we were looking at an exception.

Today, that boundary is blurred because our reference group is selected algorithmically.

And the algorithm has no reason to show us the 26-year-old who graduated from university, found a decent job, rents an apartment, goes to the gym three times a week, has a normal relationship and is slowly saving for a home of their own. By almost every historical standard, that person is probably living a perfectly successful life, but their life is too normal to generate engagement.

This, I think, is where we find one of the least recognized sources of anxiety and dissatisfaction created by social media. It is not simply about envy. It is about losing the real reference point by which we measure our own progress.

But social media has not only shifted our expectations about what we should achieve. It has also shifted our expectations about how quickly we should achieve it. It has created a kind of compression of the timeline to success.

It is no longer enough to want to become financially successful. You begin to feel that you should already have become successful. It is not enough to want to improve your body; somewhere in the subconscious there is an idea that a spectacular transformation should happen within three months. It is not enough to start a company and gradually build it, because if after two years you still have not achieved major success, it is easy to start feeling that you must clearly be doing something wrong.

Real life has almost never worked that way.

How does this affect young people?

I often hear, and to some extent I have thought so myself, that young people today are unmotivated and lazy. But that is probably not the right diagnosis.

Young people today are not less motivated. They may even be more motivated, but they are less patient and have completely distorted reference points for how long it takes to reach a certain stage of development.

Their ambitions may even be greater than those of previous generations. They want a successful career, their own business, financial independence, a great body, travel, an apartment, an interesting life and freedom. The problem is not a lack of desire. The problem is a false perception of the time, effort and number of failed attempts that normally stand behind such results.

I think a very dangerous cycle is being created: enormous motivation generated by the spectacular examples we see, followed by unrealistic expectations about the speed of the results. And this is something that needs to be pointed out constantly.

Still, it would be wrong to conclude from this that showing exceptional people and exceptional results is bad in itself. Quite the opposite. This is precisely where social media has one of its greatest positive sides.

Imagine a young person growing up in a poor environment where nobody owns a business, nobody has studied at a top university and nobody has done anything that goes beyond the limits of that environment. Before the internet, their reality could easily have sent them a simple message: “People like us don’t do things like that,” discouraging that young person from trying to break through.

The internet can show them that they do.

One exceptional example can open up a horizon that previously did not exist at all. It can show that something is possible, provide motivation, spark an idea and break through the limitations of the local environment.

That is why the problem is not that we see the exceptions. The problem is that we lose the information that they are exceptions.

That is the difference between inspiration and anxiety.

And perhaps this is exactly why the biggest problem with social media is not that it is full of fake people, fake photographs and fabricated success stories. Against those, at least, we are gradually developing a defence mechanism. It is much harder to protect ourselves from something that is completely true, but statistically unrepresentative.

The most dangerous lie on social media is not a lie at all in the classical sense.

Nikola Spasov is a communications strategist, researcher and political consultant.

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