The Green-Eyed Scroll
We've all felt it - that twinge of envy when scrolling through social media. Your friend's perfect vacation photos. A colleague's impressive funding success. Someone's immaculate home renovation (I see those impossibly perfect painted skirting boards). Social media platforms sometimes feel like they are specially designed to make us feel like we can’t keep up or that we are missing out. But what if digital technology doesn't just make us envious of others, but can actually lead us to envy ourselves?
Digital Breeding Grounds for Envy
Envy is an unpleasant emotion prompted by negative social comparison (Protasi 2021). It is a painful, aversive feeling that involves experiencing oneself as lacking in light of someone possessing something that you want and value. It is a feeling that intermingles inferiority and covetousness, while begrudging the person their perceived superiority
Social media platforms creates a fertile ground for envy to flourish in several key ways:
We see idealized versions of others. Online, people typically share their highlight reels—the beach pics, not the airport delays; the promotion announcement, not the late nights working; the multi-tiered rainbow cake, not burnt cast-offs in the bin. We see the peaks without the troughs, which can make our own lives seem lacking by comparison. When we encounter others online, we don’t have to work to idealise the other. In selectively curating and tailoring their posts, they do that for us. And with sleek filters and de-contextualised feeds, our technology adds additional sparkle.
Our comparison pool expands. As Francis Bacon (1868, 32) has it: “Where there is no comparison, no envy; and therefore kings are not envied but by kings”. To envy someone we must be aware of them and feel they are suitably similar to us. In the past, our comparison circle was limited to those physically near us. Now, we can follow the lives of hundreds or thousands of people across the globe. Worse, social media influencers often seem more relatable than traditional celebrities, allowing us glimpses into their "real" lives and making it easier to identify with them. This prompts us to compare our ordinary lives to their carefully curated ones. This dramatically widens the pool of people we might compare ourselves to, increasing opportunities for envy.
Numbers turn intangible value into measurable metrics. Likes, shares, and follower counts provide seemingly objective measurements of social success. When a peer's post receives hundreds of likes, it can intensify our envy by confirming that others also value what they have, deepening our feeling that we want what others have got.
Digital Self-Envy
What I am most interested in is the ways in which digital technologies facilitate self-envy. Envy that is directed at versions of ourselves.
When Google Photos shows you memories from five years ago, or when you scroll back through your own Instagram feed, you might feel envious of your past self—your younger appearance, your carefree 20s, or opportunities you once had.
Filters and editing tools allow us to create idealized digital versions of ourselves. We might envy what we could look like with the perfect lighting, smoothed skin, or enhanced features. AI-generated versions of ourselves, and even future technologies like "digital twins", can create autonomous-seeming digital versions of ourselves that might make for uncomfortable comparison with our organic-bound fleshy, fallible selves.
What makes this self-envy so powerful is that digital technology does the cognitive heavy lifting for us. Rather, than having to imagine or remember alternative versions of ourselves, technology creates and preserves these versions, making comparison almost effortless. While self-envy is possible offline, digital technologies amplify the opportunities for this emotion and at the same time making it easier.
How Digital Technology Shapes What We Envy
Beyond facilitating envy, technology influences what we consider enviable in the first place. As our self-expression increasingly happens online, we place more value on things that translate well to digital platforms.
Visual representation dominates online. Your thought-provoking conversation doesn't photograph well for Instagram, but your café visit does. The deep satisfaction of completing a difficult project isn't as immediately sharable as a vacation selfie.
This visual emphasis shifts what we consider important for our identities. When companies flood our feeds with beauty products, fashion items, and lifestyle goods that are visually appealing and easily marketed, they reinforce these values, creating new sources of envy.
Finding Balance in a Digital World
Next time you feel that pang of envy while scrolling, pause and reflect. Are you comparing your behind-the-scenes to someone else's highlight reel? Or perhaps envying a filtered version of yourself that never truly existed? Remember that what becomes enviable in digital spaces is often shaped by design choices and marketing strategies, not necessarily what contributes to genuine fulfilment or even things you really care about.
In a world of perfected digital representations, sometimes we need to remember to embrace and value our imperfect, non-filtered selves.
References
Bacon, F. (1868) Bacon’s Essays and Colours of Good and Evil. Macmillan.
Protasi, S. (2021). The philosophy of envy. Cambridge University Press.
Additional Reading
Ferran, Í.V. (2019). Narrative fiction as philosophical exploration: a Case Study on Self-Envy and Akrasia. Literature as Thought Experiment, Brill Fink, 123–137.
Ferran, Í.V. (2022). I could have been you. Moral Psychol Envy, 18:77.
Osler, L. (2024). (Self-) envy, digital technology, and me. Topoi, 43(3), 659-672.
