Every few months, another think piece drops blaming social media for everything from anxiety and depression to political polarization and the collapse of civilization. Social media is the villain, the corrupting force, the thing destroying our mental health and social fabric.
It’s an easy narrative. It’s also incomplete.
Yes, social media companies exploit human nature. But here’s what we conveniently forget: so does almost every other industry. Luxury brands exploit our status anxiety. Casinos exploit our reward systems. Fast food exploits our evolutionary craving for salt, sugar, and fat. The entire advertising industry is built on exploiting psychological vulnerabilities.
Does anyone really need a $10,000 handbag? Of course not. Yet we don’t write breathless articles about how Louis Vuitton is destroying society, even as they open pop-up stores selling $500 dog bowls. We understand that luxury brands are in the business of status signaling, and we accept it as capitalism doing its thing.
So why the double standard for social media?
Those platforms make their money from advertising, so anyone who pays to advertise on them is also very much complicit in any harm caused by the platforms.
The real problem isn’t social media. The real problem is the fundamental mismatch between our ancient brains and our modern world. Until we acknowledge this deeper issue, we’ll keep blaming symptoms while missing the disease.
Our Stone Age Brains in a Digital Age World
Dr. Michael Platt, a neuroscientist studying how hormones and status shape our decisions, describes the core issue with remarkable clarity on the Huberman Lab podcast:
“Our brains are designed for… 200,000 years ago, our species, homo sapiens. And what was that environment like? Well, we lived in small groups with face to face contact somewhere between probably 20 and no more than 100 people. You knew all of them, you talk to them every day. Things didn’t really move faster than antelope or change faster than the seasons. There was very little wealth inequality.”
And now?
“We’re in these industrialized societies. We have money, we’re in markets, we’re interacting with thousands of people, perhaps millions of people, their behaviors, their thoughts, everything are impinging on us, stuff is changing super, super fast.”
This isn’t a social media problem. This is an evolutionary mismatch problem.
Our brains evolved to navigate small tribal groups where social comparison was limited to the 20-100 people we actually knew. Status hierarchies existed, but they were tangible and finite. You knew your place. You knew your people. You competed for resources and mates within a comprehensible social landscape.
Now? Dr. Robert Sapolsky, a neuroendocrinology expert, describes the modern predicament perfectly: “As you scroll through a feed, you are being exposed to thousands, if not millions of contexts. This meal, that soccer game, this person’s body, this person’s intellect. It’s a vast, vast landscape. So the context is completely mishmash.”
We didn’t evolve for this. Our prefrontal cortex, our sense of where we exist in social hierarchies, has “essentially wicked out into infinity.”
The Exploitation Is Universal, Not Unique
Social media platforms discovered something uncomfortable about human nature: negativity bias. People stare longer at things that make them angry or upset than at things that make them feel good. Ten-week-old babies stare longer at angry faces than smiling faces. This is deep in our evolutionary wiring.
As Johann Hari explains in his research on focus and attention, social media algorithms didn’t create negativity bias; they just weaponized it. “The fancy term for it is negativity bias… Our ancestors who weren’t looking out for risk and danger probably got eaten.”
But again, this exploitation isn’t unique to social media.
Luxury brands exploit our status anxiety. Scott Galloway, a professor of brand strategy at NYU Stern, built his career understanding this: “Prestige brands trade at higher multiples of revenue due to increasing income inequality and their ability to manufacture scarcity.” The entire luxury industry thrives on making us feel inadequate unless we signal our status through expensive purchases.
Walk into any high-end store. The artificial scarcity, the exclusivity, the subtle (and not-so-subtle) messaging that you’re not quite good enough without this product—it’s all designed to exploit the same status-seeking, comparison-driven psychology that social media taps into.
Why don’t we have congressional hearings about Hermès damaging teen mental health? Why no documentaries about how Rolex is destroying democracy?
Because we’ve normalized this exploitation in traditional commerce. We understand that advertising manipulates. We know brands create artificial needs. We accept it as the cost of participating in consumer capitalism.
The Real Culprit: Collective Insecurity in a World Changing Too Fast
The deeper issue isn’t the platforms or the brands. It’s our collective insecurity in navigating a world changing at unprecedented speed.
We’re not comparing ourselves to our neighbor anymore. We’re comparing ourselves to billionaires, influencers, carefully curated highlight reels, and algorithmically optimized versions of success that may not even be real.
The psychologist Laurie Santos describes interviewing Clay Cockrell, a wealth psychologist who works exclusively with the ultra-wealthy. If money solved the problem, Cockrell would be unemployed. Instead, he has a thriving practice because even billionaires suffer from the comparison trap. They think $50 million will make them happy. When it doesn’t, they decide they need $100 million. When that doesn’t work, they need to be multi-billionaires.
As Santos puts it: “We constantly compare ourselves against others, but we never pick people that are doing worse than us. We always pick people who are doing better than us.”
This isn’t a social media problem. This is a fundamental human psychology problem amplified by modernity.
We’re all trying to find our way in a world that our brains weren’t designed for. Status hierarchies that used to be clear and contained now extend infinitely in every direction. The rules changed faster than our neurobiology could adapt.
The Fix: Knowledge Is Power, Awareness Is Agency
Here’s the uncomfortable truth that empowers: you are being manipulated, constantly, by almost everything around you.
Social media exploits your negativity bias and comparison instincts. Luxury brands exploit your status anxiety. Casinos exploit your reward circuitry. Dating apps exploit your fear of missing out. News media exploits your threat-detection systems. Political movements exploit your tribal instincts.
This isn’t conspiracy theory. It’s just capitalism plus evolutionary psychology.
But here’s the liberating part: once you understand the mechanism, you gain agency.
When you recognize that your impulse to buy that designer handbag is the same status-seeking psychology that makes you check Instagram likes, you can step back and make a conscious choice. When you understand that the anxiety you feel scrolling through LinkedIn is your brain trying to navigate status hierarchies it wasn’t designed for, you can choose differently.
The goal isn’t to delete all your apps and move to a cabin in the woods (though if that works for you, great). The goal is to acknowledge the mismatch between your natural instincts and your modern environment.
Your brain thinks social media engagement is actual social connection because it triggers similar neurochemical responses. It’s not. Your brain thinks buying status symbols will secure your place in the tribe. It won’t. Your brain thinks comparing yourself to millions of people on the internet is adaptive behavior. It isn’t.
None of this is your fault. But all of it is your responsibility.
Once you understand that you’re a 200,000-year-old brain trying to navigate a world that changes faster than evolution can adapt, you can make better choices:
- Recognize when platforms are exploiting your negativity bias, and choose to disengage
- Understand that status signaling (whether through luxury goods or social media likes) is a biological drive, not a character flaw
- Accept that comparison is inevitable but infinite comparison is pathological
- Know that feelings of inadequacy in modern society are normal responses to an abnormal environment
The mismatch isn’t going away. Society will keep changing faster than our brains can evolve. More platforms will emerge, more brands will exploit our psychology, more systems will weaponize our ancient instincts.
But when you understand the game being played, you can choose whether to play, how much to play, and on what terms.
Stop Blaming the Platforms, Start Understanding the Problem
Social media didn’t create status anxiety, comparison behavior, tribalism, or any other psychological vulnerability. These are features of human nature, honed over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.
What social media did—what all modern technology and marketing does—is scale and accelerate these natural tendencies to unprecedented levels.
But focusing all our outrage on social media while ignoring the same exploitation everywhere else is just another form of misdirection. It’s easier to blame Instagram than to confront the uncomfortable reality that we’re all navigating a fundamental mismatch between who we evolved to be and the world we’ve created.
Luxury brands will keep selling $10,000 handbags. Social media platforms will keep optimizing for engagement. Advertisers will keep exploiting cognitive biases. That’s not changing anytime soon.
What can change is your awareness. Your understanding. Your agency.
Know that you’re being manipulated. Know that it’s not your fault that ancient instincts don’t serve you in modern contexts. Know that the feelings of inadequacy, anxiety, and endless comparison are normal responses to an abnormal environment.
And know that with that knowledge comes the power to choose differently.
Stop blaming social media. Start understanding the evolutionary mismatch. That understanding is the first step toward reclaiming your agency in a world designed to exploit you at every turn. The next step is becoming aware of how you react to the constant manipulation. And finally, choose how you want to respond.
And maybe, just maybe, once enough people recognize the real problem, we’ll refocus our energies towards fulfilling our basic human needs of building meaningful human connections and helping the global tribe to prosper.
References
- Dr. Michael Platt on Huberman Lab: How Hormones & Status Shape Our Values & Decisions
- Dr. Robert Sapolsky on Huberman Lab: Science of Stress, Testosterone, Aggression & Motivation
- Johann Hari on Young and Profiting: How to Avoid Distraction and Reclaim Your Focus
- Dr. Laurie Santos on Huberman Lab: How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols
- Scott Galloway on Prof G Pod: No Mercy / No Malice: High Anxiety
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