Everyone watches her.

She’s up before sunrise and back before breakfast, returning to two happy kids who slept perfectly through the night. Her morning routine is the stuff of legend – she’s fed the others and got half a day of work done before anyone else has even put their shoes on.

It’s roughly thirty thousand years ago, and this girl is absolutely smashing the Stone Age.

And yet nobody in her tribe mistakes this snapshot for the whole story. They know she can’t walk without pain, hasn’t slept properly for months – and that those children aren’t even hers.

Not one person envies her – they’ve seen enough to know better.

The Original Algorithm

We’re supposed to watch other people.

Social comparison is ancient and useful; looking sideways helps the brain build a picture of what normal’s supposed to look like. In a world of close-knit communities and hunter-gatherer lifestyles this had real practical value – other people finding more berries, running faster or building better shelters was information worth paying close attention to.

But it worked because it wasn’t possible to edit the evidence.

Comparison used to come with a pretty hefty lump of context attached – the good bits were visible, but so were the costs, compromises and failures that inevitably came with them.

Nobody got the promotion without half the tribe also knowing about the rather unfortunate flare in their haemorrhoids.

Reality came as a package deal, gloriously whole and impossible to filter.

That is, until we built a tool which stripped it for parts.

Bad Data

Social media used to be fun – it was a jumble of pointless Facebook statuses, badly tagged photographs and people proudly showing us what they’d eaten for lunch.

Somewhere along the way the feed stopped showing us our friends and started serving an endless procession of happy strangers instead.

Instagram takes the top 1% of people’s lives and presents it to the mind as average. This shifts the goalposts for what normal looks like, gradually recalibrating the brain’s internal model of where we ought to be by now.

My highlights reel gives you a carefully curated snapshot of my life – yours follows suit and returns the favour.

Between us, we trim away the ugly bits and make the messy details disappear.

Multiply that pattern across millions of accounts and the airbrushed fragments start to look suspiciously like reality. All this editing comes at a cost; science has plenty to say about how this collective illusion impacts the brain.

But more importantly, what does it do to the soul?