What the algorithm isn’t showing you.

Witnessing Coachella this year hit different, watching it unfold on my feed triggered something beyond the usual FOMO. It made me think about how genuinely out of touch with reality social media has become. I found myself less envious of the festival itself and more struck by a bigger question: how far has the world I see on my screen drifted from the one I actually live in?

I came across a series by a spanish content creator Rimbuxx, in which he breaks down the real-life statistics that social media has made us forget. And it made me think. We scroll through our feeds and receive this constant drip of dopamine, the rush of possibility, of a life that feels almost within reach. If I did it, so can you. And the thing is, it isn't entirely a lie. With genuine intention and the willingness to work for something, lives do change. That part is real.

But somewhere between the inspiration and the reality check, something gets lost. After the scroll comes the crash, a low-grade anxiety, a sense of being behind, a nagging feeling that your ordinary Tuesday is somehow evidence that you are failing. You are not comparing yourself to a person. You are comparing yourself to a curated, compressed, financially backed highlight reel.

This is not about limiting beliefs or talking yourself out of ambition. It is the opposite, actually, keep your eyes on the stars, absolutely, but let your feet stay on the ground. I'm the last person to tell you to lower your expectations. Own the delusional optimism, then use it as the reason you care about this. The most ambitious people are actually the ones most at risk of measuring themselves against the wrong ruler. Big plans require measured steps, and if your baseline stems from a lie, you will most likely feel like you missed something or that you’re going crazy, asking yourself “why is it so easy for everyone else?”.

Another important thing to mention is that in the midst of scrolling you lose a sense of who you really are, everything is shiny, every other reel is a plan on how to switch your life around in 20 days, a 10 step guide to become rich or an endless self improvement game, losing all sense of purpose and self concept. To a point where you want anything except the life you’re living.

Let’s jump to the numbers, shall we?

When it comes to travelling, 80% of the world's population has never been on a plane. Not this year. Ever. Only 2 to 4% fly internationally in any given year, and within that group, 1% of people are responsible for half of all aviation emissions. So when your feed looks like a constant rotation of airport lounges and ocean views, what you're actually watching is a fraction of a fraction of humanity, on repeat, until it starts to look normal. The Dubai trip is definitely not a baseline.

We’ve all seen the 5 a.m. morning routines at this point, somehow it reminds me of that famous scene in American psycho, perfect skin, perfect abs. Getting lean enough to see definition means reaching a body fat percentage where, for a lot of women, periods become irregular or stop entirely. That part never makes the caption. What gets posted is the result. What doesn't get posted is what it cost, and whether it was worth it.

Then there's homeownership, which social media has turned into a personality trait.

The average first-time buyer in the UK is 34, and that's up from 29 in 1981. In Australia and Canada it's 36. In Switzerland it's 48. Forty-eight years old, in one of the wealthiest countries on earth, is when the average person buys their first home. The 24-year-old with the apartment isn't evidence of what's possible if you just work hard enough. They're an exception.

Leaving home altogether follows the same pattern. Across the EU the average is 26. In southern Europe it runs well into the 30s. Which means the embarrassment people feel about still living at home in their mid-twenties is largely a social media problem, not a real-world one.

Income has become a taboo.

In countries like New Zealand and South Africa, the average household is spending more than it earns. In the UK, the US, Canada, savings rates sit around 5% or below. Five percent. The person on your feed who seems to buy something new every week and fly somewhere every month is either in a financial minority so small it barely exists, or they're financing a version of their life that isn't sustainable. Both are common. Neither gets mentioned.

And finally, the glorified entrepreneurship.

90% of startups fail. 20% are gone within the first year, 70% don't survive past year five, and the single most common reason, in nearly half of all cases, is that nobody actually wanted what they were building. But open any business-adjacent corner of the internet and it's wall-to-wall success stories and grateful founder posts and hockey stick graphs. The failure is everywhere in reality and nowhere online. And the people who do make it? The average age of a successful founder is 45. Not the person on the podcast. Not the LinkedIn thought leader. Forty-five, after decades of attempts most people never hear about.

There's a specific kind of anxiety that comes from measuring your chapter three against someone else's chapter twenty, except you can't even see their chapter twenty because what you're actually seeing is a curated performance of it. The timeline you've been panicking about was never real. It was just the only one being filmed.

Before you leave

If you're reading this, you probably have a device in your hand, a healthy body, a roof over your head, and people who love you. That right there makes you privileged.

So I’m here to remind you of how much you already have, and how much you matter. Social media has one job, and it does it well, making you feel like you're not enough. But you are already somewhere. And that somewhere is worth more than any highlight reel.

Real Life Statistics That You Forgot Because of Social Media

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Real Life Statistics That You Forgot Because of Social Media

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