AHA ! The friendship paradox has a quietly cruel talent : it makes you think you’re watching the world, when you’re mostly watching your network. And your network, by design, overexposes the most connected people, the ones who seem, by pure optical illusion, to “succeed” more.
This piece leans on a study with a very explicit title : “Temporal dynamics of the friendship paradox in a smartphone communication network.” For 119 days, researchers followed a group of students through their smartphone interactions, then rebuilt the network day by day to measure how the friendship paradox appears and stabilizes over time.
In plain terms, the friendship paradox says this : your friends have, on average, more friends than you do. It’s not a personal attack, it’s a statistical property : highly connected “hubs” are simply more likely to appear in everyone’s list of connections. So when you look around, you’re often looking at an average that is biased toward centrality.
Picture a party. Some people stay within a small circle. Others move around, link groups, know someone everywhere. If you ask ten people, “Name three people you know here,” the same names will keep coming back : the hubs. Your brain then extracts a “normal.” And that normal is already tilted, before you even decide what to think.
What the study adds, and this is the real value, is the speed of the phenomenon. The researchers use a simple indicator : for each person, they compare their level of connectivity to the average connectivity of their contacts. As soon as the indicator is above 1, it means “my contacts are, on average, more connected than I am.” They observe that the bias is present from the start, increases, then stabilizes around one week.
One week. That means a group builds, very early on, an implicit mental map : who is visible, who responds, who relays, who sits “at the center.” After that, the perception becomes surprisingly stable. People adapt to it. Compare themselves against it. Make decisions from it.
Another key point, often counter-intuitive : weak ties amplify the phenomenon more than strong ties. Weak ties are bridges : occasional interactions, brief crossings, introductions. They connect you to very different zones of the network, often more central ones. They also carry opportunities. In short, they fuel growth, but they can also manufacture a false sense of what is “normal.”
It’s hard not to think about LinkedIn here. It’s the industrial version of the same mechanism : you don’t see “the market,” you see a selection. And that selection naturally puts the most connected, most active, most commented-on profiles in front of you. Visibility and success start to blur in your mind, even though they are not the same thing. On LinkedIn, observable popularity is a bundle of signals (posting rhythm, interactions, relays) that do not automatically translate into concrete outcomes. A signal is not a trajectory.
AHA ! So the takeaway is not “don’t compare yourself.” Humans compare, that’s the whole operating system. The takeaway is more precise : when you compare, check what you are comparing yourself to. Are you comparing yourself to reality, or to the most central, loudest, most exposed slice of your network ?
And now, the epistemological truth, in the exact sense I mean it : you only find what you look for. But more importantly, you often end up looking for what your network discreetly places in front of your eyes. On LinkedIn, you think you choose your readings. In reality, you mostly chose people who choose for you. You follow three people, and without noticing, you start “hanging out” with their references, their obsessions, their idols, their friends, their mentors, their little private algorithmic universe. It’s like going to dinner at someone’s place thinking you’re choosing the menu, then realizing you’ll eat what their friends like, because they brought the dishes and they outnumber you.
That’s exactly what the friendship paradox reminds you of, with a calm and elegant cruelty : your friends have more friends, so they connect you statistically to more connected people, so your feed fills up with hubs, so your brain decides “this is the norm,” and you start looking for more of that norm. You stop chasing truth. You start chasing visibility. And visibility, as everyone quietly knows, is a highly addictive substance when served daily in small doses with a “like” button.
AHA ! That’s why this isn’t a moral slogan, it’s a methodological alert : if you truly want to “find” something else, you sometimes have to search elsewhere, deliberately, even against your feed. Otherwise, your friends lend you their glasses, blind spots included, and you end up seeing the world exactly like them.
AI-assisted English translation
