Thinking about slow-moving effects, I have a theory that exposure to fiction is one reason people feel inadequate and depressed. For most of human history our idea of what it meant to be normal came from real people around us. We didn’t know any fictional characters except for a handful of stories told around the fire. After radio was invented we got to know a lot more fictional characters, a lot faster and more intimately than we get to know most real people. Then television made it more vivid because we could see them. We think of many of these unreal people as our friends. Some of them have more impact on us than real people do. It’s a lot easier to feel boring and inadequate than it was when we didn’t feel like we knew people whose lives are so much more dramatic and interesting than ours. I think this is a large part of why it feels like failure to have an unremarkable job or date average people. It’s a very slow-moving social change nobody would have seen coming.