Status in the Age of Followers: Hierarchy Online and Off

Follows: The Pecking Order (Society 1) · Institutions (Society 5) · Why We Care So Much About Games (Sports) · the Personal Development deep dives

In this deep dive
1. Veblen: wealth has to be seen
2. Positional goods: when what counts is having more than others
3. Festinger, Aristotle and the people we compare ourselves with
4. Status you can count: likes, followers and views
5. The great argument, part one: what the correlations show
6. The great argument, part two: experiments, natural experiments and a national test
7. The attention economy and the new status class
8. What to do with all this

Picture two people posting the same photo of the same sunset. One gets four likes. The other gets four thousand. Nothing about the sunset differs. Nothing about the two people's lives has changed in the last minute. And yet for many of us, that gap would sting. We'd check again an hour later. We might wonder what we did wrong.

That small sting is the subject of this piece. Earlier pieces in this series looked at hierarchy from a distance: where it comes from, how classes and castes ranked people, how much people move, and the institutions that hold it in place. This last piece comes close up. It asks how the oldest human question, where do I stand, works when standing is measured in public numbers that update in real time.

It begins with classic thinkers who wrote long before smartphones but explain a lot about your feed. Then it takes the biggest live argument seriously: does social media harm young people's mental health, and how much? Serious researchers disagree, and you'll get both sides at their strongest. It ends with what a reader can actually do.

Part 1 — Veblen: wealth has to be seen

In 1899 an American economist named Thorstein Veblen published The Theory of the Leisure Class. It's an odd, ironic book, written in a stiff, formal style that sounds like a scientist describing a strange tribe. The tribe was the American rich of the Gilded Age. Veblen's central idea is short enough to fit on a phone screen.

"In order to gain and to hold the esteem of men it is not sufficient merely to possess wealth or power. The wealth or power must be put in evidence, for esteem is awarded only on evidence." (Veblen, 1899)

Respect, in other words, isn't given for what you have. It's given for what others can see you have. From that one idea, Veblen built a theory of why the rich behave as they do.

His first answer was conspicuous leisure. In older societies, the clearest proof that you were rich was that you didn't have to work. Visible idleness, long hours at sport or study of useless things, hands that had never done manual labour: all of these said "I am above needing to earn." His second answer, which gave the language its most famous phrase, was conspicuous consumption: spending on things whose main job is to be noticed. "Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods," he wrote, "is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure."

Veblen didn't think this was only a vice of the rich. He thought the habit ran all the way down. "No class of society, not even the most abjectly poor, forgoes all customary conspicuous consumption." And he thought it could never be satisfied by economic growth, because the goal is relative. In his words, "no general increase of the community's wealth can make any approach to satiating this need, the ground of which is the desire of every one to excel every one else."

The stranger in the crowd

The part of Veblen that reads most like a prophecy is a passage about cities. In a village, everyone knows how rich you are. In a modern city, you are surrounded by strangers whose "transient good opinion" still matters to you. Veblen noted that people increasingly gathered in "churches, theaters, ballrooms, hotels, parks, shops," among others to whom "one's everyday life is unknown." To impress these passing observers, he wrote, "the signature of one's pecuniary strength should be written in characters which he who runs may read."

That last phrase means: so plain that someone hurrying past can read it at a glance. Veblen concluded that as life filled up with strangers, showy spending would matter more and quiet leisure less, because spending is easier to read quickly.

Now think about a social media feed. It's a crowd of strangers and half-strangers, scrolling fast, giving each image a second or two. It's Veblen's theatre lobby with billions of seats. The holiday photo, the restaurant table, the gym mirror, the new trainers: they're signatures written for people who are scrolling past. Veblen never saw a screen, but he described its audience.

What Veblen got wrong, or left out

Veblen is a starting point, not a final word. Not all display is about money: people also display taste, knowledge, kindness and skill, as Pierre Bourdieu argued at length (see Class, Status and Power, Society 2). Not all consumption is display: most things are bought because they're useful or liked. And Veblen was satirising as much as measuring. His book has almost no data in the modern sense; its strength is a way of seeing, which later researchers have had to test piece by piece.

Part 2 — Positional goods: when what counts is having more than others

Veblen had an important ancestor. In The Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith stopped in the middle of a discussion of taxes to define what counts as a "necessary." His answer was social, not just biological. A necessary is not only what keeps you alive but "whatever the custom of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even of the lowest order, to be without."

His example was a linen shirt. The ancient Greeks and Romans lived comfortably without linen, he noted. "But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt." Not having one would signal a "disgraceful degree of poverty." What you need, in other words, depends on what others around you have. Smith wasn't describing vanity. He was describing the price of being treated as a respectable member of your community.

Fred Hirsch's arms race

Two centuries later, in 1976, the economist Fred Hirsch gave this idea a sharper name in Social Limits to Growth. He called them positional goods: things whose value to you depends on your position relative to others, not just on the thing itself.

A clean water supply is not positional. It's just as good to you whether your neighbours have one or not. A top degree, used to get a job, is different. If everyone gets a degree, it no longer sets you apart, so you need a better one. A house with a view, a seat at the most exclusive restaurant, being the most-followed person in your class: all positional. Their value comes partly from the fact that others can't have them.

Hirsch's worry was that growth can't fix this. As a society gets richer, more of what people want becomes positional, and the competition for it becomes an arms race. Everybody spends more and works harder to stay in the same place.

Do people really think this way?

Researchers have tested how strongly people care about relative position. In a 1998 study, the researchers Sara Solnick and David Hemenway asked people to choose between two imaginary worlds. In one, they would earn more than others. In the other, everyone, including them, would be much richer in real terms, but they would earn less than others. About half picked the first world: less real income, as long as they were ahead. How much people cared about their relative position depended on what was being compared. Concern was strongest for attractiveness and for praise from a supervisor, and weakest for holiday time.

A 2005 study by the economist Erzo Luttmer, titled "Neighbors as Negatives," used American survey data and found something similar in real life. Holding a person's own income constant, the higher the earnings of people in their local area, the less happy that person reported being.

And inequality seems to sharpen the concern. In 2016, the researchers Lukasz Walasek and Gordon Brown looked at internet searches across countries. People in more unequal countries searched relatively more often for status brands such as Prada, Louis Vuitton and Chanel. That pattern was stronger among well-developed countries, and they found no evidence that a country's income alone explained it.

Growth can't satisfy a positional want. When everyone gets more, the bar simply moves.

None of this proves that people are only status-seekers. It does show that where you stand is something many people value for its own sake, and are willing to give up real things to get. Social media didn't invent that. It found a way to measure it.

Part 3 — Festinger, Aristotle and the people we compare ourselves with

If status is relative, then the obvious question is: relative to whom? You don't compare yourself with everyone. You compare yourself with some people, and the choice matters enormously.

Festinger's theory

In 1954 the American psychologist Leon Festinger published "A theory of social comparison processes," a classic of social psychology. His starting point was simple. People want to know how good their opinions and abilities are. When there's an objective test (a stopwatch, an exam score), they can use that. When there isn't, they look at other people.

But not just any people. Festinger argued that we prefer to compare ourselves with people who are similar to us. A beginner tennis player learns little from comparing herself with a professional; she learns from players near her level. Later researchers added a key distinction:

• Upward comparison is comparing with someone better off. It can inspire ("if she can do it, so can I") or deflate ("I'll never be that good").
• Downward comparison is comparing with someone worse off. It can comfort ("at least I'm not in that situation"), though it can also bring anxiety ("that could be me").

Aristotle got there first

Festinger's similarity idea would not have surprised Aristotle. In the Rhetoric, written in the fourth century BCE, he described envy as a kind of pain at the good fortune of people "like" ourselves, and noticed exactly whom it targets. In J. H. Freese's translation: "They envy those who are near them in time, place, age, and reputation." Nobody, he pointed out, "tries to rival those who lived ten thousand years ago." He quoted an old saying, "Potter [being jealous] of potter." Potters envy other potters, not kings.

This is the crucial point for understanding social media. Celebrities have always been richer and more beautiful than ordinary people, but they were far away, like kings. Social media brings the comparison down to people "near" you: classmates, colleagues, the friend from school, the stranger your own age doing your own hobby slightly better. It also shows you their best moments, carefully chosen, placed right next to your ordinary Tuesday.

Two kinds of envy

In 2007 the psychologists Richard Smith and Sung Hee Kim reviewed the research on envy in Psychological Bulletin. They defined it as "an unpleasant, often painful emotion characterized by feelings of inferiority, hostility, and resentment caused by an awareness of a desired attribute enjoyed by another person or group of persons." They also drew a distinction that later research took up: envy proper, which is hostile, and a benign envy that lacks the hostility.

A 2009 study by Niels van de Ven, Marcel Zeelenberg and Rik Pieters tested that distinction. They started in the Netherlands, where Dutch has separate words for the two kinds, and then found the same two experiences in samples from the United States and Spain, where one word covers both. The difference was in what each kind of envy made people want to do:

This matters for what comes later. Comparison isn't simply good or bad. It can push you to improve, or it can sour into resentment. What tips it one way or the other is part of what researchers argue about.

Part 4 — Status you can count: likes, followers and views

For most of history, status was a fuzzy thing. You could tell roughly who was respected in your village, but nobody had an exact number. Social media changed that. It turned approval into a count that's public, precise, comparable and constantly updated. A like count is something new in human history: a status scoreboard for ordinary people.

Is a follower count prestige?

The word "followers" is apt. The Pecking Order (Society 1) described two routes to rank: dominance, taken by fear, and prestige, given freely by people who want to watch and learn from someone. A following looks like prestige turned into a number: people choosing to pay attention to you. But the number is a blunt instrument. It can't tell admiration from curiosity, amusement or outrage. It can't tell a loyal audience from a lucky week in a recommendation algorithm. And it ranks everyone, the teenager and the pop star, on one public scale, which village reputations never did. That's what makes it new. The status motive is ancient; a single, exact, public scoreboard for it is not.

What a like does in the brain

In 2016, a team led by Lauren Sherman at UCLA built a fake version of Instagram and showed it to teenagers lying in a brain scanner. The photos were shown with either many likes or few likes, and the teens could add their own like.

Two findings stood out. First, the teenagers were more likely to like photos that already had many likes, whether the photos were neutral or showed risky behaviour such as drinking or smoking. The number itself pulled them. Second, viewing photos with many likes was associated with greater activity in brain regions involved in reward, social thinking, imitation and attention. The researchers argued this showed one way peer influence works online. A caution, though: this was a laboratory study of what happens in the brain while viewing likes. It shows a mechanism, not long-term harm.

When a platform tried hiding the score

The companies know the scoreboard matters. Instagram spent a period testing what happened when it hid like counts. In May 2021, Meta announced the result: everyone on Instagram and Facebook would get the option to hide their public like counts. Its explanation was unusually frank. It had tested hiding likes "to see if it might depressurize people's experience on Instagram." What it heard was that not seeing like counts "was beneficial for some and annoying to others," partly because people use like counts to see what's popular. So the score stayed, with an off switch.

The scoreboard is steep

Online status isn't just countable. It's extremely unequal. In a 2018 study of a random sample of YouTube channels over ten years, the media researcher Mathias Bärtl found that on average about 85% of all views went to about 3% of channels. Most people who post get a small audience. A few get a giant one. That shape matters for status: it means the people you see most are, almost by definition, the rare winners.

Celebrities used to be like kings: far away. Social media brings the comparison down to the potter next door, and shows you only her best pots.

Why this connects to fans and games

There's an older status move worth noticing here. Why We Care So Much About Games (Sports & the Body in Motion) describes how fans "bask in reflected glory," feeling bigger when their team wins even though they did nothing. Online, the same instinct shows up in sharing a famous person's post, following accounts that signal what group you belong to, and arguing for "your" side. Much online status isn't personal at all. It's borrowed from the group you've attached yourself to.

Part 5 — The great argument, part one: what the correlations show

A note before this part and the next: they discuss research on anxiety, depression, self-harm and young people's mental health. If you're struggling, please talk to someone you trust or a professional. If you're in crisis or thinking about ending your life, in the US you can call or text 988 (the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline); in the UK and Ireland, Samaritans answer on 116 123; elsewhere, contact your local emergency or crisis service.

Now to the biggest live argument in this whole area. It starts from a worry almost everyone shares: young people are struggling. Haidt's book points to sharp rises in anxiety, depression and self-harm among teenagers, especially girls, from the early 2010s, around the time smartphones and social media became nearly universal among them. Even his sharpest critic in this section, Candice Odgers, writes of "rising levels of teen depression and anxiety." The dispute is about why. Two well-informed camps answer very differently. Here are both at their strongest.

The case for harm: Jonathan Haidt

The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt made the case for harm most famously in The Anxious Generation (2024). His argument is that between about 2010 and 2015 childhood went through a "Great Rewiring," shifting from a "play-based childhood" to a "phone-based childhood." Children got less unsupervised time in the real world and much more unsupervised time online. Haidt's phrase for this is overprotection in the real world and underprotection online. He believes this shift is a major cause of the rise in teenage mental illness, especially among girls: the phone-based childhood crowded out free play, independence and face-to-face connection, fragmented attention, and exposed children to constant comparison and new risks. His campaign groups its proposals into four areas: phone-free schools, more childhood independence, age limits for social media, and tech regulation.

The case for caution: Candice Odgers and Amy Orben

In a review of the book in Nature in March 2024, the psychologist Candice Odgers wrote that "the book's repeated suggestion that digital technologies are rewiring our children's brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness is not supported by science." She made several points:

• Most studies find no association, a small one, or mixed results, between social media use and teen mental health.
• Where there is an association, it may run the other way: struggling teenagers may use social media more, rather than social media making them struggle.
• Large studies across many countries don't show the consistent pattern a major cause would produce.
• Focusing on phones "might distract us from effectively responding to the real causes" of the mental health crisis, which may include many other things.

She also wrote something easy to miss: "Two things can be independently true." Social media can be a poor environment for children, and still not be the main cause of the rise in mental illness. She agreed many of the book's solutions were reasonable.

The psychologists Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski are known for the most-quoted correlation study in this debate. In 2019, using three large datasets covering 355,358 adolescents, they found that digital technology use explained at most 0.4% of the variation in teenagers' well-being. To give that a sense of scale, they compared it with other things in the same data. The association was in the same range as those for eating potatoes or wearing glasses. Nobody thinks potatoes cause depression. The point is that a very small correlation can't by itself show a big harm.

What sits between the camps

Two more findings complicate both simple stories.

First, timing in development may matter. In 2022 Orben, Przybylski, Sarah-Jayne Blakemore and Rogier Kievit analysed two UK datasets of 84,011 people aged 10 to 80. The link between social media use and lower life satisfaction was most negative in younger adolescents. In the 17,409 young people they followed over time, there seemed to be "windows" of sensitivity, when higher social media use predicted lower life satisfaction a year later. Those windows came at different ages for girls (11 to 13, and 19) and boys (14 to 15, and 19). The effect also ran the other way: lower life satisfaction predicted more social media use later.

Second, averages hide individuals. In a 2021 study, Patti Valkenburg and colleagues had 387 adolescents aged 13 to 15 report their social media use and self-esteem six times a day for three weeks. When they analysed each teenager separately, 88% showed no effect or a very small one, 4% showed positive effects, and 8% showed negative effects. A tiny average can hide a minority who are harmed and a minority who benefit.

Part 6 — The great argument, part two: experiments, natural experiments and a national test

Correlations alone can't settle a question about causes. So both camps look at experiments and natural experiments, where something changes for some people and not others.

Experiments: what happens when people cut back

• A short limit. In a 2018 study by Melissa Hunt and colleagues, 143 undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania were randomly assigned either to limit Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat to 10 minutes per platform per day, or to carry on as usual, for three weeks. The limited group showed significant reductions in loneliness and depression compared with the others. Both groups showed less anxiety and fear of missing out, which the authors suggested might come from simply tracking their use.
• A month off Facebook. In a large experiment published in 2020, the economist Hunt Allcott and colleagues randomly assigned American adults to deactivate Facebook, or not, for the four weeks before the 2018 US midterm elections. Those who quit spent less time online and more time offline, including watching TV alone and socialising with friends and family. They knew a little less about the news, became somewhat less politically polarised, reported higher well-being, and used Facebook less afterwards.
• A surprise. In 2024, Lisa Walsh, Sonja Lyubomirsky and colleagues reported an eight-day experiment with 338 members of Generation Z, comparing two kinds of restriction. Cutting back on smartphone use in general brought a range of benefits, including higher life satisfaction and less loneliness and stress. Cutting back on social media alone brought few benefits, and even some more negative emotion. The device and the social media apps may not be the same problem.

A natural experiment: Facebook arrives at college

When Facebook first launched, it opened to American colleges one campus at a time. In a 2022 paper in the American Economic Review, Luca Braghieri, Ro'ee Levy and Alexey Makarin used that staggered rollout as a natural experiment. They found that Facebook's arrival worsened students' mental health, and that the evidence pointed to unfavourable social comparison as one channel: students comparing themselves with peers who seemed to be doing better. This is Festinger's theory showing up in economic data.

Haidt's reply, and the state of play

In April 2024 Haidt published a reply to Odgers. "Odgers is wrong to say that I have no evidence of causation," he wrote. He pointed to the experiments, the natural experiments, the international scope and timing of the rise, the "eyewitness testimony" of young people who blame social media themselves, and what he calls group-level effects: when a whole community of teenagers moves its social life onto the platforms, abstaining becomes costly, and those who try to quit find themselves socially isolated. Studies that treat use as an individual dose, like sugar, can miss that. On uncertainty, he argued that "at a certain point, we need to take action based on the most plausible theory." In April 2026 he and Zach Rausch set out "seven lines of evidence," while acknowledging that "Scientific debates are never closed."

Meanwhile, in 2023 the US Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, issued an advisory on social media and youth mental health. It said that up to 95% of 13- to 17-year-olds use a social media platform, that teenagers who spend more than three hours a day on social media face double the risk of mental health problems such as symptoms of depression and anxiety (a finding from correlational research), and that "we cannot conclude social media is sufficiently safe for children and adolescents."

A national test: Australia

The argument has now left the journals. Australia's Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024 came into effect on 10 December 2025. It requires designated social media platforms to take reasonable steps to stop Australians under 16 from creating or keeping accounts. Preliminary estimates suggested that around 1.2 million young people would be affected.

Early evidence is limited. One study published in the BMJ in 2026 followed 408 Australian adolescents from just before the law to about three months after. More than 85% of those under 16 reported still using the covered platforms, often through their own accounts, and some used fake accounts or other workarounds. The researchers found little evidence of an immediate drop in social media use among under-16s. That study is small, relies on self-report and looks only at the first months. Larger evaluations, tracking thousands of young people and their families, are under way. Whatever they find, the Australian experiment will be one of the most closely watched in this debate.

The honest summary: heavy use and poor mental health go together, a few experiments point to harm, and nobody yet knows how much of the teenage crisis social media explains.

Part 7 — The attention economy and the new status class

To understand why the status scoreboard exists, follow the money. Social media is mostly free to use because users aren't the main customers. Advertisers are. What advertisers buy is your attention.

Simon's warning

The social scientist Herbert Simon saw the logic coming in 1971, long before social media. In an essay on designing organisations for "an information-rich world," he wrote:

"A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it." (Herbert Simon, 1971)

Information isn't scarce any more. Attention is. And whatever is scarce becomes something people compete for and sell.

The merchants of attention

The writer Tim Wu traced this business model a long way back in The Attention Merchants. In his telling it began when newspapers started living mainly on advertising rather than on readers' subscriptions. Once that happened, the reader became the product being sold, and the paper's job was to capture as much attention as possible. Radio, television and the internet followed the same model, each more precise. Wu quotes the technologist Jeff Hammerbacher: "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks."

The writer James Williams, in Stand Out of Our Light (2018), put the users' side simply: "No one wakes up in the morning and asks: 'How much time can I possibly spend using social media today?'" Yet that's often the number the systems are built to raise. Public like counts, follower numbers and streaks aren't neutral features. They tap the status motive described in Parts 1 to 3, and status-seeking keeps people posting, checking and scrolling.

Influencers: a status class with a business model

Out of this system came a new kind of status: being followed. Researchers call it micro-celebrity, a term popularised by the media scholars Theresa Senft and Alice Marwick. Marwick defined it as "a mindset and set of practices in which the audience is constructed as a fan base, popularity is maintained through ongoing fan management, and self-presentation is carefully assembled to be consumed by others." Her book Status Update (2013) studied San Francisco's tech community in the years between the dot-com boom and the App Store, and argued that "Web 2.0" encouraged a preoccupation with status and attention rather than the democratic culture it promised.

In older terms, influencers are a status group in Max Weber's sense (see Class, Status and Power): a group defined by a shared kind of honour and lifestyle, not just by money. They're often also a business, earning from brands that want access to their followers. Being admired is the asset, and attention is the income.

Two facts keep the glamour in proportion:

• Most don't make it. Bärtl's YouTube study, in Part 4, found that a small minority of channels captures most views. Fame online follows the steep curve of positional goods: there's only so much attention to go around.
• Much of the work is unpaid. The media scholar Brooke Erin Duffy, in (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love (2017), studied women working as fashion bloggers, beauty vloggers and designers. She called their effort "aspirational labour": mostly unpaid work now, in the hope of being paid and recognised later. Her book draws attention to the gap between the handful who find lucrative careers and the rest, whose "passion projects" amount to free work for brands.

This new class changes the rest of us, too. When the most visible people in your feed are professionals at being looked at, an ordinary life can start to look like failure.

Part 8 — What to do with all this

There's no need to throw away your phone to live well with status. Hierarchy is part of human life, as The Pecking Order showed. What you can change is which ladders you climb, which people you measure yourself against, and how much of your attention you hand over. Here is what the research supports, labelled honestly.

Choose your pond

Festinger's insight is that you pick your comparison group, mostly without noticing. You can pick it on purpose. A feed full of strangers who are professionally beautiful or successful sets your whole life against their edited best moments. Muting accounts that leave you feeling small is not weakness; it's choosing a fairer comparison. The research on envy suggests one useful test: does this account leave you wanting to do something (benign envy), or leave you resentful and flat (the malicious kind, or plain discouragement)?

Use envy as information

Benign envy is a signal. If you keep envying a friend's language skills, it may be telling you that you value learning a language. A Life That Means Something (Personal Development) explains how to turn vague longings into named values and small actions. That's the healthy use of upward comparison: it points at what you care about.

Watch how, not only how long

The evidence on "passive" versus "active" use is weaker than once thought. A 2015 study by Philippe Verduyn, Ethan Kross and colleagues found, in the laboratory and in daily life, that passively scrolling Facebook lowered people's mood, partly by increasing envy. But a 2022 review of 40 studies by Valkenburg and colleagues found that most did not support the simple claim that active use is good and passive use is bad. A practical version that fits both: notice how specific apps, accounts and times of day make you feel, and adjust those. You are your own best data, as the person-specific research in Part 5 suggests.

Protect sleep and real-world time

The simplest steps don't depend on who wins the argument. Keep phones out of the bedroom at night. Have some daily stretches without a screen. Spend time with people in person. These help on almost any theory of what's happening, and they're the kind of environment design that Why Most Self-Improvement Fails (Personal Development) argues works better than relying on willpower.

Be kind to yourself about it

If you catch yourself checking likes or measuring yourself against strangers, the answer is not self-contempt. Self-Discipline Without Self-Hate (Personal Development) covers the research on self-compassion and its critics, and why treating slips as normal and fixable makes habits easier to change.

Play a longer game

Positional goods, as Hirsch noted, are an arms race nobody wins. Many non-positional goods, such as friendship, health, skill, free time and meaning, don't lose value when other people have them too. The Long Game (Personal Development) looks at what compounds over a life, and at what people come to regret.

The takeaway

Status has always been relative, visible and sought for its own sake. Veblen showed that esteem goes to wealth that can be seen, especially by strangers. Smith and Hirsch showed that what we need, and much of what we want, depends on what others have, so growth alone can't satisfy it. Festinger and Aristotle showed that we compare ourselves with people near and similar to us, and envy research shows that comparison can push us up or sour into a wish to pull others down. Social media turned all of this into public numbers, sold to advertisers as attention, with a few influencers at the top of a very steep curve. Whether it's a major cause of the rise in teenage mental illness is a genuine, open argument: Haidt says yes and wants action now; Odgers, Orben and others say the evidence is weaker and the causes wider. Australia's under-16 law is a live test. Meanwhile, you can choose your comparison group, use envy as a signal, protect sleep and offline time, and invest in goods that don't lose value when others have them.

Try this: for three days, each time you close a social app, ask one question and jot down a single word in reply: "Do I feel better, worse or the same?" At the end, look at the pattern. Which apps, which accounts and which times of day left you worse off? Change just one thing: mute one account, move one app off your home screen, or charge your phone outside the bedroom. Then repeat the three-day check and see what changed.

Sources & Further Reading

Sources
- Veblen, T. (1899). The Theory of the Leisure Class. Chapters 2–4 (Project Gutenberg #833).
- Smith, A. (1776). An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Book V, Chapter II (Project Gutenberg #3300).
- Hirsch, F. (1976). Social Limits to Growth. Harvard University Press. Cass, D. (2023). Positional goods and social equality. Res Publica, 29(3), 501–520.
- Solnick, S.J. & Hemenway, D. (1998). Is more always better? A survey on positional concerns. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 37(3), 373–383.
- Luttmer, E.F.P. (2005). Neighbors as negatives: relative earnings and well-being. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 120(3), 963–1002.
- Walasek, L. & Brown, G.D.A. (2016). Income inequality, income, and internet searches for status goods. Social Indicators Research, 129(3), 1001–1014.
- Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations, 7(2), 117–140.
- Aristotle, Rhetoric, Book II, chapter 10, trans. J.H. Freese (Loeb, 1926), via the Perseus Digital Library.
- Smith, R.H. & Kim, S.H. (2007). Comprehending envy. Psychological Bulletin, 133(1), 46–64.
- van de Ven, N., Zeelenberg, M. & Pieters, R. (2009). Leveling up and down: the experiences of benign and malicious envy. Emotion, 9(3), 419–429.
- Sherman, L.E., et al. (2016). The power of the like in adolescence. Psychological Science, 27(7), 1027–1035.
- Meta (26 May 2021). "Giving People More Control on Instagram and Facebook." about.fb.com.
- Bärtl, M. (2018). YouTube channels, uploads and views: a statistical analysis of the past 10 years. Convergence, 24(1), 16–32.
- Haidt, J. (2024). The Anxious Generation. Allen Lane / Penguin Press. The Anxious Generation movement, "About" page (anxiousgeneration.com).
- Odgers, C.L. (2024). The great rewiring: is social media really behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness? Nature, 628, 29–30.
- Haidt, J. (9 April 2024). "Yes, Social Media Really Is a Cause of the Epidemic of Teenage Mental Illness." After Babel. Haidt, J. & Rausch, Z. (9 April 2026). "The Case Against Social Media: Seven Lines of Evidence." After Babel.
- Orben, A. & Przybylski, A.K. (2019). The association between adolescent well-being and digital technology use. Nature Human Behaviour, 3(2), 173–182.
- Orben, A., Przybylski, A.K., Blakemore, S.-J. & Kievit, R.A. (2022). Windows of developmental sensitivity to social media. Nature Communications, 13, 1649.
- 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.
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Go deeper
- 🌐 Candice Odgers, "The great rewiring" (Nature, 2024) — the sharpest short case for caution about The Anxious Generation. Read it together with the next link.
- 🌐 Jonathan Haidt, "Yes, Social Media Really Is a Cause of the Epidemic of Teenage Mental Illness" — Haidt's direct reply to Odgers, setting out the evidence he thinks shows causation. Reading both is the fastest way into the real argument.
- 🌐 Orben, Przybylski, Blakemore & Kievit, "Windows of developmental sensitivity to social media" (free full text) — a careful study that shows why age and timing may matter more than averages.
- 🌐 Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (Project Gutenberg) — free. Read chapters 3 and 4, on conspicuous leisure and conspicuous consumption. The prose is dry, but the jokes are deadpan and still land.
- 📘 The Anxious Generation — Jonathan Haidt (2024). The book at the centre of the debate. Clear, urgent and full of proposals; read it with Odgers' review in mind.
- 📘 Status Update — Alice Marwick (2013). An inside look at how status, attention and self-branding work in the tech world that built social media.
- 📘 The Attention Merchants — Tim Wu. The history of the advertising model behind your feed, from newspapers to apps.
- 🌐 See also, in this library: The Pecking Order (Society 1), Class, Status and Power (Society 2), Why We Care So Much About Games (Sports), and in Personal Development, Self-Discipline Without Self-Hate, A Life That Means Something and The Long Game.