Humans are hardwired to compare, everything. They especially compare their idea of themselves to their perception others. Social media has been a catalyst for this type of comparison and allowed people to compare themselves easily, with everyone, everywhere. This isn’t an accident, it has become the primary way to hijack and monetize your attention. Before social media (and television) you compared yourself to your friends and neighbors, in real life, who were largely in a similar position as yourself. This created a dynamic: constructiveness was valued over craziness.

Advertising executives want you to have a relationship with what they’re selling. With an extreme increase in competition for attention (as communication became easier through print, then radio, then television, then the internet) while simultaneously lowering the opportunity costs to create and maintain relationships (mainly through social media) the dynamic shifted from constructiveness to craziness as advertisers began to reward those that could hijack the most attention.

The like button created instant reward from people that users had real relationships with and this was the Trojan horse for shifting the value of those relationships to the platforms and advertisers. Eventually, real relationships were replaced by transactional relationships. These no longer require mutual benefit to maintain because the incentive (money) no longer comes from the person giving their attention. That person is just signaling that their attention has been captured through likes, follows. The advertisers are the ones who pay, they pay only for access to brains, and so long as “content creators” can keep collecting attention above the attrition rate they will get rewarded by those advertisers.

In this dynamic, crazy gets rewarded over constructiveness.