This might be one of the biggest social problems of our generation that I see, so I had to talk about it.
That feeling that everyone around you has more friends, gets invited to more things, and seems to be living a much more connected social life than you are.
Maybe you scroll through social media and see people at parties you were not invited to. Maybe you notice your coworkers making weekend plans that don’t include you.
Maybe you look around and think, “How does everyone else seem to know so many people?“
And here’s the thing that makes it worse – you start to wonder if there’s something wrong with you.
But what if I told you that this feeling is not actually about your social skills or your personality?
What if the reason you feel less popular than everyone else has nothing to do with how likable you are, and everything to do with mathematics that affects every single person on the planet?
Today we’re going to explore something called the
Friendship Paradox
a psychological and mathematical fact that explains why most people feel like they have fewer friends than their friends do.
So let’s start with the basics. The friendship paradox was first identified by sociologist Scott Feld in 1991, and this is what it states: on average, your friends have more friends than you do.
Not just your friends specifically – everyone’s friends have more friends than they do. It’s a little confusing so give it a few mins and it will all make sense.
Here’s how it works. Imagine a simple social network – let’s say 5 people at a workplace. Let’s call them Person A, B, C, D, E
Person A has two friends. Person B and Person E. Person B has two friends: Person A and Person E. Person C has two friends: Person D and Person E. Person D has two friends: Person C and Person E. But Person E has eight friends – including A, B, C, D, plus four others.
Now, if you ask these 5 people who their friends are? Person E appears in EVERYONE’s friend list, while the others only appear in 1-2 friend lists each. Right?
So let’s say you’re Person A and you look at your friends, you see:
– Person B (who has 2 friends) and you see
– Person E (who has 8 friends)
Your brain automatically calculates: “My friends average 5 friends each, but I only have 2. I must be less popular!”
The same thing happens to everyone else. They all have a Person E in their network, making everyone else look more popular than they actually are.
This means that when you unconsciously survey your own friends, whether on social media or in real life, you’re more likely to see the popular people than the regular ones.
Your brain sees this and concludes, “Wow, all my friends are more popular than me.”
But here’s what your brain doesn’t account for: everyone is experiencing this same distortion. Even Person E, the social butterfly, looks around at their friends and sees other highly connected people, because popular people tend to know other popular people.
So even the most popular person in the room can feel like they’re falling behind.
This is not just theory – researchers have tested this in Facebook networks, college dorms, and professional settings. The pattern holds every time.
Most people feel less popular than their friends, not because they’re wrong, but because the math creates an optical illusion.
But the friendship paradox is just the beginning. There’s another layer to this that makes the feeling even more intense
Sampling Bias
Your brain doesn’t just randomly observe people – it observes the people who are most visible, most active, and most likely to cross your path.
And guess who those people are? The ones with the most social connections.
Think about it this way. If someone has fifty friends, they’re probably out and about more often, right? They’re more likely to be at social events, more likely to post on social media, more likely to be seen in public spaces.
Meanwhile, someone with five close friends might be having meaningful conversations at home or in quiet coffee shops – places where you’re less likely to notice them.
So when you look around and think about “people in general,” you’re not actually seeing a random sample of humanity.
You’re seeing the most socially active subset of humanity, and then comparing yourself to that biased sample.
It’s like judging your running ability by only looking at people who jog in the park – of course they all seem more athletic than the average person.
This sampling bias gets even worse online.
Social media algorithms are designed to show you engaging content, which often means content from people who are actively posting, sharing, and connecting.
The person who has 3 close friends and doesn’t post much? They’re invisible in your feed.
The person who’s always out with different groups, always posting stories and photos? They dominate your perception of what “normal” social life looks like.
And now what happens is: Your brain starts to use this biased sample as evidence for how YOU should be living.
You see all these highly connected people and think, “This is what healthy social life looks like. This is what I should be doing.”
But you’re comparing yourself to statistical outliers — the most social 10% of people—and wondering why you can’t keep up.
Now let’s talk about why this illusion hits so hard emotionally.
It’s not just that the math is working against you – it’s that your brain is wired to pay extra attention to social information, especially information that might signal rejection or exclusion.
From an evolutionary perspective, being excluded from the group was a death sentence.
Our ancestors who were kicked out of the tribe didn’t just lose their social life – they lost their protection, their resources, their chance of survival. So our brains developed a hypervigilant system for detecting signs of social threat.
The problem is, this ancient alarm system doesn’t know the difference between actual rejection and statistical illusion.
When you see evidence that other people have more friends, your brain interprets it as a warning: “You’re falling behind. You’re at risk. You need to do something about this.” That triggers self-doubt, and a desperate need to fix your social situation.
But here’s the irony:
The more anxious you become about your social standing, the more likely you are to pull back from social situations.
You start declining invitations because you feel awkward. You avoid reaching out to people because you assume they’re too busy with their many other friends.
You become more self-conscious in conversations because you’re worried about being judged as socially inadequate.
And when you pull back, you actually do become less connected – not because there was anything wrong with you originally, but because the illusion convinced you to behave in ways that made the illusion come true.
See, here’s the truth that the friendship paradox obscures: there is no right number of friends.
There’s no social scoreboard where having more connections automatically makes you a winner.
There are people who thrive with large social networks, and there are people who prefer small, intimate circles.
There are people who love parties, and there are people who prefer one-on-one conversations. All of these approaches are valid.
The only thing that matters is whether your social life feels right to you – not whether it matches what you see other people doing, not whether it fits some external standard of popularity, but whether it nourishes you and supports the life you want to live.
So the next time you find yourself thinking, “I feel everyone else has more friends than me,”
Remember:
Everyone else is thinking the exact same thing.
The math guarantees it.
