Social Media as a System for Recursive Self-Evaluation

Classical texts treated vainglory as a temptation of the soul. Social media turns it into infrastructure. The old loop of comparison is now instrumented: scored, ranked, and fed back in real time.

From Moral Mirror to Metric Dashboard

Like counts, shares, follower graphs, and ranking feeds externalize social judgment as continuous feedback. Users no longer infer whether they are seen; they receive a stream of quantified approximations [15]. This intensifies self-monitoring and encourages tactical presentation.

Humblebragging is one predictable adaptation. Research shows it is a distinct self-presentation strategy that often backfires, yet remains attractive because it promises status plus modesty at once [17].

Why the Loop Becomes Sticky

Platform design rewards repeat posting, emotional salience, and audience calibration. Users learn to ask not "Is this true?" but "Will this travel?" This is close to Climacus's warning about imagined approval, except the audience is no longer imagined; it is instrumented and scored.

Empirical work on social media and well-being suggests that frequent passive comparison and feedback chasing can reduce subjective well-being and increase status anxiety [16]. The issue is not only individual weakness; the environment is tuned for evaluative loops.

Institutionalized Vainglory

A useful synthesis is this: old traditions diagnosed the mechanism, modern platforms scale it. The architecture rewards public self-curation, selective disclosure, and moral signaling. Pride and false humility become platform-competent behavior.

If this is right, the ethical task extends beyond personal virtue. It includes redesigning digital settings so that attention and status cues do not dominate the conditions of self-understanding [18].

This essay extends the same throughline: pride in one's humility. In metric-driven environments, even humility can be staged, tracked, and rewarded as identity performance.