The Concentric Circles of Doom
Do you ever wonder why your closest friends and people in your local community seem genuinely happy while you’re convinced you’re falling behind? Do you wonder why everything you see online reflects someone either crushing it or completely falling apart?
Welcome to the Concentric Circles of Doom.
The Circles of Reality
Picture your life as a series of expanding circles, like ripples in a pond. At the center sits you. The first ring contains your family, close friends, and daily work colleagues (the people you actually know well). The second ring includes your acquaintances, neighbors, and extended community. The third ring encompasses your city, region, and even people on the national stage. And the outermost ring? That’s the global theater of social media, news feeds, and algorithmic highlights.
The closer the circle, the more balanced the reality. Your immediate circle includes real people dealing with real problems and celebrating real wins. It’s common to find yourself at a party celebrating a co-worker’s or friend’s promotion. Many people have family members who love to talk about their kids’ accomplishments. And everyone has that friend who’s proud of the marathon they just completed. None of these accomplishments are earth-shattering, but they are authentic human experiences that happen every day in every corner of the world.
But what’s sad is that the stories you get exposed to as you move outward almost exclusively represent the extremes.
The Amplification Machine
It’s a truism that social media doesn’t show you anything close to “normal”. The business model behind it can’t afford to.
The algorithm’s job isn’t to reflect reality. Its job is to capture attention. And it’s as close to a universal truth that you’ll find that attention flows to extremes. As a result, in that outermost circle, you’re bombarded with two types of content: Hyperbolic success stories and apocalyptic doom scenarios.
What you see is twenty-five-year-old crypto millionaires buying their third Lamborghini. You see Silicon Valley prodigies raising $50 million Series A rounds for apps that help you cheat. And on the other extreme you get endless streams of civilizational collapse, political catastrophe, and existential threats that make it seem like society is moments away from complete breakdown.
The result is problematic. People mistake this curated extreme for normal. They think everyone else is either crushing it or the world is ending. There’s no middle ground in the feed because middle ground doesn’t drive engagement. The algorithm learned this lesson years ago.
What’s clear is that your brain wasn’t designed for this.
For most of human history, your reference group was maybe 150 people in your tribe. You knew where you stood. Now you’re comparing yourself to the highlight reels of billions of strangers, almost all of whom you’ll never meet.
And the same mechanism that makes you feel like an underachiever also makes you feel like the world is ending. Every single day brings new evidence that democracy is failing, the economy is collapsing, climate change will kill us all, and society is irreparably broken.
The algorithm doesn’t care if its version of reality matches yours. It just needs you to keep scrolling. Mission accomplished.
Breaking Out
The solution isn’t to delete social media and live like a hermit (though honestly, some days that sounds pretty appealing). It’s to understand the game being played and adjust your reference points accordingly.
If you check in with your immediate circles, you’ll likely discover that most of life is wonderfully, boringly normal. People struggle with real problems and celebrate real wins. Almost all the people you know are just regular people doing what they can to live their best lives.
The Final Irony
We wanted social media to connect us, to expand our horizons and show us what’s possible. Instead, it’s created a funhouse mirror that distorts everything. The further out you look, the less real it becomes.
But the cure has been sitting right there in your inner circle all along.
The algorithm wants you to believe that normal is failure and extremes are success. Your friends and family are living proof that’s exactly backwards.
It’s time to trust the circles that actually know you.
Onwards and upwards,
Fintechjunkie