This browser plug-in can make you feel better about your own life by virtually dragging down your colleagues!

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Background:

Job-related social media sites (the largest of which in 2025 is LinkedIn) typically have a newsfeed that shows users what their former co-workers and classmates are working on these days.

The Issue:

There is a strong selection bias for what actually gets posted: most posts are from people reporting their successes in business.

This is intuitively reasonable: someone who just founded a new startup might post daily updates about it, but that same person would be unlikely to post so frequently about a dead-end job that they hate.

Unfortunately, this skew toward “success” may give a social media user an erroneous impression that they are failing in business life, since they’re only comparing themselves to their most successful colleagues.

As an example, the classic stereotypical newsfeed update on LinkedIn looks something like Figure 1:

Fig. 1: A user in a crummy job that they hate is likely to not be terribly encouraged to see that “Joe Smith” here has gone from being a forgettable high school annoyance to a super-successful cool guy.

Proposal:

The solution is simple: protect the user’s fragile ego with a browser plugin that will “drag down” everyone else on social media (Figure 2), preventing the user from envying them.

Fig. 2: Even though the parts in yellow are totally false (as is the picture, which has been edited with the power of generative AI), when it comes to social media, the perception is the reality.

A user viewing the profile shown in Figure 2 is likely to say “Ha! I remember that guy! Wow, I’m glad my life is going so much better, I feel great about myself in comparison!”

Conclusion:

This is a great idea that should probably just be a default feature of every web browser! This is somewhat of an extension to December 2024’s https://worstplans.com/2024/12/23/fake-successful-family-photo-frame/, which addresses a similar psychological need. 

PROS: Increases people’s satisfaction with their own lives, and prevents needless stress.

CONS: With no motivation to compete with others simply out of envy, people might start to cherish intangible things and live peaceful lives of satisfaction with their friends and family, which could cause the stock market to not go up.

Originally published 2025-11-03.