Parasocial Relationships, Social Media, and Feelings of Envy

Social media is entirely shifting our relationships with celebrities, and as such is transforming our feelings of envy. Let me explain why.

Feeling jealous of your friend is common.

You see them having something you want, and you feel envious of them; it’s a simple situation. Before social media, those feelings of envy were limited to just the people around you. This, however, has been flipped on its head.

Having worked in the world of social media for nearly a decade, I’ve seen, first hand, how the platforms we use every single day have transformed feelings of envy. But before we get into that, let’s look at a quote from the Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume. On the subject of envy, he wrote:

It is not a great disproportion between ourselves and others which produces envy, but on the contrary, a proximity. A common soldier bears no envy for his general compared to what he will feel for his sergeant. The greater number of people we compare ourselves to, the more there will be for us to envy.

His theory was that we're far more likely to feel jealousy and/or envy towards the people we know, or in his words, those we have a greater proximity to.

And it makes sense. Because we feel on the same level as those around us, the ones we’re interacting with every day (be that socioeconomically, familial, work based, or anything else) we're constantly comparing how well we’re doing in life relative to our peers. When one of our friends or a member of our family or even someone who lives down the road then gets something more than we have (a fancy holiday, a new house, a cool car, whatever) we then feel entitled to the same thing and then feel jealous because we don't have it.

Hume argues that this isn’t the case for celebrities. Of course, the example Hume uses is one of a military bent – the common soldier feeling no envy toward the general – however the metaphor translates nicely to the Public/Celebrity relationship we’re much more accustomed to now.

To modernise Hume’s idea, he suggests that we’re much less likely to feel jealousy or envy toward a celebrity because we don’t see them as our peers. In theory, we don’t look at someone like Justin Bieber and feel angry because he has a nice house or a fancy car because, on some level, we feel those things are fundamentally unattainable to us.

He has those things because he’s a celebrity and I am not, therefore I don’t feel jealous because I couldn’t get those things anyway. However, if you replace Justin with one of our friends – someone whom we believe to be “on the same level” as ourselves, we’d suddenly be flooded with feelings of jealousy when they get a nice, shiny new car.

I first read that quote of Hume’s whilst reading Wikipedia (because that’s what I do for fun these days), and it struck me as particularly interesting. I was struck by how different the modern world is to the one that Hume lived in. His Soldier/General metaphor most likely still holds up in the military world, but outside of that, our society is drastically different to that of Hume’s.

Hume argued that it was proximity that caused feelings of envy. We’re close to our friends and thus more likely to be jealous of them, whereas we don’t know anything about the lives of celebrities (or the metaphorical general), so don’t feel jealous of them.

But what happens when we are intimately familiar with celebrities?

Social Media

After reading that quote from Hume I (quite literally) said out loud: yeah, but Hume didn’t have Instagram to look at. And the more I thought about it, the more I realised just how unhealthy the idolisation of celebrities on social media has become.

In David Hume's time, people wouldn't be intimately familiar with what celebrities and people in the public eye were doing. They'd have an understanding that They have nice things and a lot of money, but these displays of wealth would be limited to the odd bit of gossip here and there, perhaps seeing some rich person riding in a carriage a couple of times, or turning up once in a blue moon for a Royal Wedding.

When we think about the idea of a celebrity in the 1700s, we think of people like Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Johnson, Jonathon Swift, and of course the monarchy of the time. The average person would have heard these names, but they’d have no real understanding of how they lived life. In Britain, a Londoner might have seen Buckingham Palace from the outside but had no real concept of the opulence within. And even if they did, as Hume suggests, the distance between themselves and those lucky enough to indulge in the finer things in life would be a gulf they could never consider crossing. And, as such, feelings of envy just wouldn’t be stirred in any meaningful way, because “they’re over there and we’re over here.”

Contrast this with the modern world.

Right now, you can open social media and see what any number of celebrities are doing, almost in real time. I can open Instagram and no doubt find a post from one of the Kardashian clan published within the last day. In that photo there will be a display of wealth in some sense: one of them might be standing on a yacht, or standing in a walk-in closet, or maybe even riding in the back of an expensive car.

With this ability to keep tabs on what various celebrities are doing came the dramatically reduced distance between them and the average person. In our interconnected world, a celebrity is no longer somebody who’s over there. They become, in a sense, someone we have access to in the same way we would be able to keep up to date with a friend. We can be in the loop of every aspect of their lives, a thing that just wasn't possible as little as thirty years ago.

And that’s not even touching the idea of parasocial relationships.

Let’s Get Parasocial

Social media hasn’t just transformed how often we see celebrities; it’s altered the relationships we have with them. The nature of connection and interaction with people in the public eye has irreversibly changed.

“Parasocial” is defined as a relationship characterised by a one-sided, unreciprocated sense of intimacy felt by a fan or follower for a well-known or prominent figure (typically a media celebrity), in which the fan or follower comes to feel that they know the celebrity as a friend.

Essentially, this form of one-sided relationship tricks the brain into treating a stranger as a peer, which is precisely the psychological condition Hume identified as the trigger for envy. Social media (and the types of content popular on platforms like Instagram and TikTok) hijacks our perception of celebrities, tricking us into seeing them as friends, rather than strangers.

And when we see strangers as friends, our brains can’t distinguish reality from the fictional relationship we become convinced exists which then, in turn, paves the way for the average person to feel envy toward a celebrity or social media influencer. We’ll get into why this is a huge problem a little bit later.

Hume's proximity argument wasn't purely social or economic; it was also informational. You could only feel close to someone whose life you could observe with your own eyes. Social media has collapsed that distance in a way that no previous technology managed. A newspaper profile of a celebrity is fundamentally different from watching their daily stories posted to Instagram; one is a curated dispatch from a remote world whilst the other mimics the texture of actually knowing someone.

And it’s that texture – the faux feeling of knowing another person – that causes parasocial relationships to be formed. It's not just that we see celebrities more, it’s that we also see them doing the same things we do, the ordinary activities that fill up our days.

To see Kim Kardashian posting a home workout or a skincare routine puts her in the same category as our neighbour; she’s doing things that we do on a daily basis, which immediately ramps up the feeling of relatability. That granularity of comparison ("she's doing the same things I do”) shifts the concept of celebrity away from something that’s “over there,” and instead gives us a false sense of friendship. We begin to see them not as strangers, but as friends.

Going back to Hume’s theory, this parasocial relationship causes us to feel huge levels of envy when we see someone we (incorrectly) perceive as being a peer having all the nice things we don’t.

In the sense of celebrities like Kim Kardashian, we can’t really argue that they’re doing this intentionally. After all, they’re using social media like the rest of us, sharing their lives like anyone else. In a real sense, most of the celebrities that have grown an audience purely on social media are just products of the world they’ve grown up in, and nobody can be blamed for that.

The same cannot be said for people who intentionally manufacture feelings of familiarity.

Influencers

Something to keep in mind is that Hume's point was partly that a great disproportion in wealth or status kills the comparison, meaning that the average person wouldn’t feel jealousy toward a monarch because they’re just too far removed from one another.

Even with the faux closeness that social media creates, most people still know they can't actually have Kim Kardashian's life. They’re watching this person with the millions of dollars and the nice house because, on some level (although what that level is will always be a mystery to me) they enjoy it. We could, then, put forward the point that the envy toward celebrities is much shallower compared to what we’d feel toward our real friends.

But the Influencer (with the capital I), makes it their job to manufacture this feeling of closeness. They take this parasocial relationship to the extreme. You cannot open social media without seeing content from influencers. Even if you do not follow them, their almost constant updates have a way of making it onto your feed. I know this is certainly the case for me. On platforms like Instagram, for example, I only follow people I know in real life, yet still, I see plenty of content with influencers doing whatever it is that influencers do.

The very essence of the name given to this type of creator is insidious – influencer. They’re telling you exactly what it is they’re doing; everything they post is geared to influence their audiences. We often see people who intentionally seek to influence people as a bit creepy, and yet when it comes to using that influence to sell products or endorse brands on social media, we happily follow them.

And there’s one particular type of influencer that’s worse than all the rest.

Hustle, Hustle, Hustle

Recently, Louis Theroux released a documentary on Netflix entitled Inside the Manosphere, where he follows various influencers popular within the “manosphere” culture.

Each of them is pretty much a carbon copy of the one that came before. They hold the same sexist views, the same outdated ideals, and all harness social media to make money from their impressionable audiences. Their content is often outrageous, specifically engineered to gain mass-amounts of views, and then convert those views into followers, and then finally into cold, hard cash.

And it’s this that makes this genre of influencer particularly insidious.

Their whole grift is predicated on being able to convince their impressionable audiences (with demographics often skewing very young) that by following the steps they outline, they’ll be able to live the same life. This goes far beyond “regular” influencers just promoting a product here and there. In situations like this, the relationship between Influencer and Audience is completely skewed.

With our Kim Kardashian example, the parasocial relationship manufactures a feeling of closeness to the person, the same as it does for most celebrities who actively use social media. With someone within the manosphere, the product being sold is closeness to the outcome: the wealth, the status, the lifestyle.

Andrew Tate (and others like him) occupies a very specific and interesting position. He displays extreme, almost cartoonish wealth – supercars, private jets, Romanian compounds – which by Hume's logic should kill the comparison. And yet the entire point of his brand is to convince the audience that this is achievable. He's selling proximity, the very thing that, according to Hume, is what drives envy. The message isn't "look at my amazing life," it's "look at your amazing future life."

What's psychologically clever (and highly manipulative) about this is that it keeps the envy productive, rather than paralysing. Pure envy of an unattainable figure tends to curdle into resentment or resignation, or indifference if we’re to go by Hume’s idea. But if you're constantly told you can achieve the same thing, the envy gets converted into motivation, which is then monetised through courses, memberships, or whatever the sales funnel points to.

It also might explain who is most susceptible to that kind of influence. Young men who feel like they're on the same starting line (not wealthy, not famous, just ordinary) are precisely the audience where Hume's proximity dynamic kicks in. Tate positions himself as someone who was once like them, which manufactures the peer-level comparison, even while displaying billionaire aesthetics.

Tate (and others like him) create this illusion that he’s just like his followers, and with the right course purchase, those followers can be millionaires too.

Conclusion

Kicked off by reading that Hume quote, I initially set out to write about the concept of jealousy and envy.

But the more I wrote, the more it dawned on me just how much social media – and the rise of the “influencer” on platforms like Instagram and TikTok – have skewed our perception of those feelings. Many of us, after seeing influencers and celebrities on our social feeds all day long, now see these same people as "friends." We feel close to them, we root for them, and (crucially) we compare ourselves to them. Hume's proximity trigger, once constrained by the physical limitations and the availability of information, has been engineered into a scalable product.

The honest truth is that social media didn't just shrink the distance between us and celebrities, it handed certain people the tools to manufacture that distance artificially, to dial it up or down depending on what they're trying to sell. As we’ve seen, the Andrew Tates of the world are the natural product of a system that thrives on controversy, clicks, and followers.

Social media platforms are well aware of this; they know their algorithms actively reward the most outlandish behaviour and manufactured controversy. The wilder you are, the more views and recognition you’ll be given.

The relatability that we’ve been speaking about – the one where an influencer with wealth far beyond that achievable by the average person, but is yet able to convince that same person they’re “just like them” – is a feature of social media algorithms, not a side effect. The envy a person will feel towards an influencer that has done everything they can to make their persona appealing is the whole point. It’s what drives engagement and keeps people coming back for more.

I think Hume was right in his assertion that proximity breeds envy. However, he could never have predicted a world where that very proximity could be faked, packaged, and monetised. The common soldier of Hume’s metaphor now has a parasocial general in his pocket at all times, whispering that the general's life is only one purchase of a digital course away.

Is there a solution to this? Probably not, if we’re being honest. Save us all throwing our phones into the ocean, or social media platforms removing any form of algorithmic intervention, we’re stuck with what we’ve got. There will continue to be influencers and content creators monetising the envy their impressionable followers feel towards them, and social media platforms will continue to reward this behaviour.

If you’re reading this, given the generally poor reception of long-form, written content, there’s a good chance you’re at least somewhat outside of the algorithm’s pushes and pulls. If this is the case, you can no doubt already see most of these influencers for what they are: people looking to sell to their audiences no matter what the cost.

We have to ask ourselves: assuming that everything we’ve been speaking about continues, and social media platforms continue to reward outlandish behaviour, and grifters continue to use drama to build audiences and make money, how do we live in this world? How do we not let their promises of cheap money or once in a lifetime deals affect us?

I think we must look at these people and remember that they’re wearing masks. We must remember that the image we’re being shown is one of careful cultivation: the Ferrari is rented and the beachfront villa is just an Airbnb. The image that influencers present of being ultra-wealthy, but at the same time, ultra-relatable, is nothing but smoke and mirrors.

We’d do well to remind ourselves of that, before we let their appeal pull us in.