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Every peek at social media allows teenagers, unconsciously, to compare themselves to others, and they rarely come out ahead. They open Snapchat and learn from the curated “stories” that the people who count are rich and beautiful celebrities. A one-minute scroll through Instagram filled with photoshopped selfies taken painstakingly from an angle that makes someone look her thinnest, can easily make even a secure and self-confident teen feel her normal body is disgusting and aberrant. Uber-wealthy teens and young celebrities, who on some level seem like peers, post “wealthies” (selfies that display their wealth) while flying around the world in their family’s private jets.

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This, therefore, leads to feeling of insecurity in teens.  If teens were seeing people like them, or worse off than them, then it wouldn’t affect them as much. But they are seeing people who are thinner, richer, more popular, more successful, more privileged. Even wealthy and middle-class kids can frequently feel, on some level, humiliated. And beyond the bubble of social media, there actually is a legitimate cause for their worry. To be sure, inequality, envy, and conspicuous consumption have always been a part of American culture, and TV certainly did a lot to expand our ability to compare ourselves to others. “But today’s teenagers are experiencing far more media exposure and they are living in conditions of far greater inequality”, according to one study by Gatehouse (2017).  This makes downward comparison hard to escape for teens these days.