Our expectations for how the world should be have changed dramatically over time. The lives of the average middle-class worker in 2018 and that of the average worker in  1918 are pretty much incomparable. As Nat Ware, a consultant and winner of the St. Gallen Wings of Excellence Award in 2017 and 2018 states, the lives most of us lead  now are more opulent than those the royalty of earlier centuries enjoyed.
Yet somehow we are still unhappy. Stress and the use of anti-depressants has skyrocketed, and suicide is the most common cause of death in most parts of the world. The idea that having more equates to being happier – a concept that many of us accept without question – can effectively be thrown out of the window.

The expectation gap

This year’s St. Gallen Wings of Excellence Award winner has presented research on this idea of social expectations before. In a 2014 TedX talk, Nat described this  dissonance between expectations and reality as “the expectation gap.” That is why, he says, we set the bar of what a life should be so high that we almost always fail to reach the standards we have set for ourselves.

There are, of course, other factors at play. Economic problems like job insecurity and rampant inflation certainly contribute to depression and sadness. Political divisions that polarise society and foster hostility among communities likely factor in, too.

But, in a world framed by social media, in which each user presents only the best aspects of their own lives, we cannot discount the role of the expectation gap in dictating how happy we are as individuals.

By surrounding ourselves with narratives that increase our expectations, we inadvertently condition our brains to believe that we should, for example, be a CEO by the age of twenty-five, or only eat vegan, organic bowls of quinoa. Our ability to absorb and internalise the media around us becomes even more dangerous when understood in light of the influencer economy and the distributed marketing techniques used by companies to subtly advertise products and services through promotions framed as genuine posts.

Dangerous influence

The failure to distinguish advertisements from real posts is something that Ware said was considerably more dangerous than traditional forms of media. His solution to the problem, though unlikely to be imposed by social media giants, would be to ensure that all advertisements were marked as sponsored, even if they were subtly presented by Instagram users.

The ability of social media to increase the expectation gap in terms of what constitutes a “good life” has profound consequences for a world beyond work. Universal basic income schemes have been deemed instrumental in building a better society, creating more space for creativity, reducing stress and helping tackle the trend towards poverty associated with long-term unemployment.

Yet wellbeing (at least above subsistence level) is very strongly linked to self-perception. People whose lives are improved by a universal basic income guarantee, for example, may still find themselves gazing upwards through the distorted lens of social media at people whose Instagram accounts seem to ooze opulence.

By continuing to shift our expectations through social media, we create a space for an entrenched underclass. It does not matter that those at the bottom are much better off than they would have been in the past in absolute terms. Nor does it matter that they are better off than dead kings. What matters is that, in an hierarchical system, those with less perceive themselves as less valued and valuable. In the absence of some grand awakening that dismisses unrealistic ideas of how a life should be lived, social media may in fact prove a powerful driver for social inequality.