QUICK ANSWER
Digital envy is the distress produced when social media makes other people’s social experiences, achievements, and pleasures highly visible while your own absence from them is equally visible. Research by Przybylski and colleagues on FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) shows it is driven by unmet needs for belonging and competence. Social media does not create these needs, but it uniquely amplifies their frustration.
Table of Contents
You see the photo from the dinner party you were not at. The group holiday came together without you. The promotion was announced by someone you graduated with. The relationship milestone of someone at exactly your age. Something tightens in your chest, and you close the app, feeling worse than when you opened it. This is digital envy: a specific form of emotional pain made possible by the visibility social media provides into other people’s lives.
Digital envy is closely related to FOMO, the Fear of Missing Out, a term that entered popular vocabulary in the early 2010s but describes a psychological pattern with deep roots in social belonging research. Understanding the distinction between these concepts and the research behind both is important for anyone who finds themselves consistently distressed by what they see in their feeds.
The good news, if any research on this topic qualifies as good news, is that digital envy follows predictable patterns and responds to specific interventions. The feelings are real, but they are not evidence about your actual life circumstances. They are evidence of the conditions of your information environment.
FOMO: The Research Foundation
Psychologist Andrew Przybylski and colleagues formally defined FOMO in a 2013 paper as a pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent. They found it was characterised by a desire to stay continually connected with what others are doing and was significantly associated with lower mood, life satisfaction, and higher social media engagement.
Crucially, Przybylski’s research identified two fundamental needs as the psychological drivers of FOMO: relatedness, the need to feel connected to and belonging within a social group, and competence, the need to feel capable and effective. When these needs go unmet, people turn to social media for reassurance, but social media’s tendency to show curated evidence of others meeting those needs actually intensifies the sense of deficit rather than satisfying it.
The result is a loop: unmet belonging needs drive social media checking; social media checking reveals others appearing to have the belonging and competence you lack, which intensifies the unmet need, which forces more checking. Research by Riordan, Flett, Hunter, Bhullar, and Roeger found that FOMO-driven social media use produced worse mood outcomes the more it was engaged in, demonstrating the loop’s self-reinforcing nature.
RESEARCH NOTE: FOMO, Psychological Needs, and Social Media Use
Przybylski et al.’s (2013) foundational FOMO study of 2,079 adults found that FOMO was highest in young men with lower levels of general need satisfaction. It was significantly associated with greater engagement with social media and with lower mood after social media use. The research suggested that FOMO is better understood as a symptom of unmet psychological needs than as a problem of social media use itself, though social media reliably worsens it.
The Visibility Effect: Why Social Media Makes Exclusion So Painful
Social exclusion has always been psychologically painful. Research by Kipling Williams on ostracism shows that being excluded activates the same neural pain circuits as physical injury. What social media adds is a new mechanism for making exclusion visible. Before smartphones, if you were not at the party, you might hear about it secondhand the following week. Now you can watch it happen in real time, photo by photo, story by story.
Researcher Sherry Turkle describes this as the tyranny of always being informed. The same technology that allows you to maintain connection across distances also ensures that you cannot avoid knowing when connection is being maintained without you. The photograph from the dinner you were not invited to is not maliciously targeted at you, but your brain processes it with the same intensity as a deliberate exclusion signal.
The visibility effect is compounded by the platform’s presentation of social events as worthy of documentation. By posting photos of group experiences, people implicitly communicate that the experience was significant enough to share. For those absent from the photo, this is doubly painful: not only were they excluded from the experience, but they are also being implicitly told that the experience was good enough to celebrate.
EXPERIENCE NOTE
Counsellors working with young adults in their 20s frequently encounter what they describe as ‘Instagram grief’: the genuine distress produced by seeing social evidence of being left out. Clients describe feeling embarrassed by how much it hurts, interpreting their own distress as oversensitivity or immaturity. In reality, the distress reflects the fundamental importance of belonging to human well-being. It is not a weak response. It is an appropriate response to a real social pain signal, amplified beyond its normal volume by platform design.
Envy vs FOMO: An Important Distinction
FOMO and digital envy are related but distinct psychological experiences. FOMO is primarily about missing experiences: being absent from things that are happening. Digital envy is broader: it includes envying achievements, relationships, appearances, and lifestyles as well as social experiences. Both produce distress but through slightly different mechanisms.
Researchers Niels van de Ven, Marcel Zeelenberg, and Rik Pieters distinguished between two types of envy with different psychological profiles. Benign envy involves wanting what another person has without wanting to harm them and is associated with self-improvement motivation. Malicious envy involves wanting the other person not to have what they have and is associated with hostility and schadenfreude.
Social media tends to produce both types depending on context. A friend’s graduation or engagement typically produces benign envy: you want those experiences for yourself. Content from strangers that seems entirely unattainable or that activates strong comparative inadequacy can tip toward malicious responses, which is partly why social media comment sections frequently contain hostile reactions to beauty, wealth, or success content.
RESEARCH NOTE: Envy and Social MediaKrasnova et al. (2013) studied the relationship between Facebook use, envy, and life satisfaction among over 600 participants. They found that passive social media consumption was a significant source of envy and that envy mediated the relationship between Facebook use and reduced life satisfaction. Notably, holiday and leisure photographs were the single most common trigger of envy, followed by social interaction content and achievement posts. The research termed this an ‘envy spiral’, where observation of positive content produces envy, which decreases life satisfaction, which increases social media checking for reassurance.
Breaking the Digital Envy Cycle
Research-informed strategies for managing digital envy focus on addressing both the emotional experience and the environmental conditions that produce it. On the emotional level, Kristin Neff’s self-compassion framework suggests treating envy with curiosity rather than shame: what does this feeling tell me about what I actually want for my own life? Envy, reframed, is information about your unmet desires rather than evidence about your inadequacy.
Gratitude journaling, specifically focused on personal positive experiences rather than comparative assessment, consistently shows benefits in clinical research. Robert Emmons’ multi-decade research programme on gratitude documents that people who regularly record specific, personal positive experiences report higher wellbeing than control groups, with effects visible on measures of physical health, sleep quality, and social relationship satisfaction.
At the structural level, curating your feed to reduce the visibility of content that consistently triggers envy is more effective than willpower-based attempts to simply feel differently. Unfollow or mute accounts that reliably produce envy responses, even if those accounts belong to people you care about in real life. Your social media feed is not a friendship obligation. It is an information environment you have more control over than you typically exercise.
KEY TAKEAWAY
- Digital envy and FOMO are driven by fundamental unmet needs for belonging and competence, amplified by a medium that makes other people’s positive experiences unusually visible. The feelings are real, and the needs are legitimate. Social media checking to satisfy them does not work and typically worsens the distress.
- Structural feed curation and direct investment in meeting belonging needs offline are more effective than any amount of emotional willpower applied to a poorly designed information environment.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is FOMO a mental health condition?
FOMO is not a clinical diagnosis, but it is associated with several measurable mental health outcomes, including anxiety, depression, and lower life satisfaction. When persistent and severe, it can indicate underlying unmet needs for belonging or safety that benefit from therapeutic attention. In most people, it is a normal response to specific environmental conditions rather than a clinical disorder.
Why does FOMO feel worse when I am already having a bad day?
Psychological research on emotional states and social comparison shows that negative baseline mood significantly amplifies the impact of upward social comparison. When you are already feeling inadequate or disconnected, evidence of others’ positive experiences hits harder. This is why the same social media content can feel fine one day and devastating the next.
Can you have FOMO about things you would not even enjoy?
Yes, and this is one of the most important features of FOMO. Research shows it often functions less as a genuine desire for specific experiences and more as a signal about belonging: the desire not to be excluded from the group’s experience, regardless of whether you would actually enjoy the experience itself. Seeing photos from a party you would find exhausting can still produce FOMO because the signal is about inclusion, not enjoyment.
Does FOMO decrease with age?
Research suggests yes, with a general pattern of declining FOMO through adulthood. Older adults tend to show greater life satisfaction with their own circumstances and less reactive comparison to others. This may reflect developmental shifts in identity security, the narrowing and deepening of social networks with age, and reduced time on social media platforms.
How do I explain to someone why I find their posting of group events hurtful?
This is a real relationship conversation rather than a social media problem. The most effective approach is specific and non-accusatory: naming what you experienced without attributing intent. Something like ‘I noticed the photos from last weekend and felt left out. It has made me aware that I would like to spend more time with you. It opens a conversation without blame and focuses on the underlying need.
