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this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2026
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Sounds like you consume useful information. I wager she uses socials as many: to compare herself to others, perusing a mix of ego-affirming and ego-damning content. These are powerful emotional hooks and oscillating between those states can be confounding. Add a dash of fatalism, which is not hard to come by in this culture, when at a low, and I think it easy to see how one might capitulate.
There are a lot of people out there that think their personality traits are inherent and that their physical attributes are static. In fact, my brother was one of these people, to an extent. He passed away at 40 years old due to morbid obesity. I attribute his downfall to capitulation by way of comparison. He came to think the hole was too big and that his genetics were too poor to make changes, despite me providing an example to the contrary. Sadly, my parents fanned the flames of his dissonance with their own identity-bound delusions.
So, my guess is that you have developed a healthy personal philosophy and have not surrounded yourself with the type of people or digital content that renders that philosophy dissonant.
But it should also be noted, teenagers are particularly targeted by and vulnerable to such messaging. In my 30s I can look around and see the evidence against such comparisons, but at 16 I was just some kid who worried she'd never be attractive or well liked. Had I been in spaces that encouraged such attitudes such as Instagram or 4chan I would have been really vulnerable to it.
Young people are often overly worried about such things because adolescence is a difficult and transitory stage where these worries are developmentally appropriate. They're supposed to have adults who can help them deal with this, and peers that they can learn by interacting with, but it's normal to not believe your parents on such issues and interactions with peers has been moved online with social media and there's little interaction with adults. This has led room for teenagers to be preyed on by algorithms that encourage their worst instincts and online communities that teach anything from antisocial behavior to masochistic epistemology.