[futureshock]

I would guide the comparison to the people closest to you, peers, bosses, schoolmates, people whose pet pictures you look at on Facebook. If those people are doing a lot better than you then it can cause some seriously negative emotions. I think the negative impact of social media is that we would have been previously unaware of the lives of more distantly related social connections such as old school friends or coworkers we'd fallen out of touch with and would only have people from our own family and town to compare with. Now you can see that Jimmy just got promoted at Google and took his last vacation to Nepal and you know for sure you've fallen behind on the hedonic treadmill.

[soheyl]

Agreed. The focus of the original article was the widening gap between the top 1% (or 5, or 10) and the rest of the population. I doubt that it will cause "unhappiness". Unhappiness exists when you compare yourself with people within your percentiles (+- 5%).

A plumber in West Virginia is not unhappy because Bezos is so rich. He is unhappy because his welder brother-in-law just got paid after a better paying contract job (or is heavily in debt) and bought a used Audi.