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How Social Media Reshaped the Stories We Look Up To

There was a time when the people we admired most were known to us personally, such as a parent, a teacher, or a community elder whose choices we had witnessed across years. Admiration was grounded in proximity and shared experience. Today, for a growing number of people, the figures they most admire are strangers encountered through a screen: influencers, content creators, and online celebrities whose carefully curated lives appear both aspirational and accessible. This shift is not merely cultural. It is psychological, and its consequences deserve serious examination.

Researchers in media psychology describe the emotional bonds that form between social media users and online personalities as parasocial relationships, connections that feel deeply personal yet remain fundamentally one-sided. The person being admired has no knowledge of the admirer; the relationship exists entirely in the mind of the observer. Studies published in Current Opinion in Psychology and PubMed confirm that these bonds activate the same neural pathways as genuine social relationships, which explains why they feel so real. Yet because they are built on curated content rather than lived experience, they are also inherently selective, since the audience sees only what the creator chooses to reveal.

This selective visibility distorts the nature of admiration itself. Traditional role models were admired for how they behaved under pressure, in private, and across time. Parasocial figures, by contrast, are admired for an image, one that is managed, edited, and strategically presented. When that image is the foundation of admiration, what is actually being admired is not a life, but a performance. Research consistently shows that this form of admiration is more susceptible to disillusionment and more likely to generate negative self-comparison than admiration rooted in real-world observation.

The stories we genuinely grow from are not always the most polished. They are the ones that show us how someone navigated uncertainty, handled failure, and kept going without an audience watching. Social media, for all its reach, tends to filter out precisely these moments, replacing the complexity of a real life with the coherence of a brand.

[Adapted from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352250X21001573]