“My last post was in 2017,” says Maahi Gilder, a 24-year-old brand manager at Glitters Hardware, who claims she’s chronically online despite having no visible Instagram presence. “I love watching and sharing Reels. I actually run my company’s social media too. I’m everywhere except my own profile,” she shares cheerfully as though she’s hacked the system: maximum entertainment, minimum exposure. It wasn’t always like this. When Gilder was younger, she had a wholesome feed and only got rid of all her posts when she was starting university. “I didn’t want new people to be able to judge me within three seconds,” she says. “Instagram profiles sometimes feel like a résumé that you know people are going to come and stalk.”

The wisdom of crowds is famously illustrated by the 1907 story of Galton's ox, where statistician Francis Galton analyzed nearly 800 guesses for the weight of an ox at a county fair. While individual estimates varied widely, ranging from informed opinions to wild guesses, the final average of the entire crowd was 1,197 pounds, which was remarkably just one pound off the actual weight. This phenomenon demonstrates that a diverse collective can produce a near-perfect answer because individual biases and errors cancel each other out, offering a final "measure of the middle".

However, most of us — about 65% of the general population — never become high functioning ‘adults’, i.e. we never make it past Stage 3 (out of 5 Stages!). We still lack an independent sense of self because so much of what we think, believe, and feel is dependent on how we think others experience us.