How Social Media Moved Meaning from ‘We’ to ‘I’

Written in 2025, before the book, while I was learning to work with AI, and revised in October 2026. Back then, AI did far more of the writing than it does now, and I deferred to it more: these essays were a way of learning subjects and ideas, written down as I went, rather than finished arguments. My thinking has moved on since: for where it stands now, see the framework, and for how I work now, the About page.

FROM ‘WE’ TO ‘I’ · 1 OF 5

Introduction: The Rise of the Individual

Spend a few minutes on any social platform and a pattern shows itself. Posts like “my journey matters”, “my truth” and “this is my stand” turn up again and again, from quiet reflections to sharp political takes. Each one puts the person posting at the centre.

For most of history, meaning worked the other way round. It came from something larger than the self: a god, the order of the cosmos, the tribe or the nation. People found their place by fitting into it.

That changed slowly, over centuries, long before anyone carried a phone. Social media did not start the shift. It made it louder.

The aim is to understand the change, not to judge it. Where there is good evidence, I’ve used it. Where there isn’t, I’ve said so.

When Meaning Was Given

For much of human history, meaning was not something people made for themselves. It was given to them by a force beyond the self. In ancient Mesopotamia, whole communities built ziggurats as stairways to the gods. In medieval Europe, cathedrals like Notre-Dame took generations to build, each one an act of shared faith. Beyond the West, India’s Vedic hymns were chanted together, and China’s Confucian codes bound people to family and duty. Kings had egos and poets had muses, but the frame they lived inside was collective.

That frame was a structure as well as a belief. Daily life ran on shared acts: prayer, harvest festivals, rites that tied “we” to something vast. Even wars were fought under a shared banner. Dissent existed and empires clashed, but meaning still flowed from a higher source rather than from within.

The Turn Inward

The move away from that frame took centuries. From the fourteenth century, the Renaissance turned attention towards human potential, and figures like Leonardo da Vinci blended faith with personal curiosity. The Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries went further, valuing reason over revelation, and thinkers like Locke framed rights as belonging to individuals. Religion still held sway, but meaning had begun to flow inward.

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries sped this up. Industrialisation brought wages, mobility and cities, and loosened people’s ties to the places they came from. Nationalism blended the “we” of the nation with individual pride. Then psychology turned attention to the self, and consumer culture began selling “your dream”.

There is some evidence that the shift is real. Using Google’s database of American books, one study found that between 1960 and 2008 the use of “I” and “me” rose by 42%, while “we” and “us” fell by 10% (Twenge, Campbell and Gentile, 2013). Word counts in books are not the same thing as attitudes, and the method has its critics. But the direction matches the story.

A wider study points the same way. Across 78 countries and more than fifty years of data, individualist values and ways of living rose worldwide from 1960, by about 12% on the study’s own measure (Santos, Varnum and Grossmann, 2017). The strongest predictor was economic development: more education, more office work and higher incomes. As people depend less on the group to get by, they seem to lean more on themselves.

What Pushed It

After the Second World War, existentialism put meaning firmly in individual hands. Its thinkers, Sartre the best known among them, argued that life has no purpose set in advance, so each person has to make one. The idea spread as faith’s grip loosened. A post like “I define my why” carries the same thought: no cosmic script, just personal choice.

Consumer culture pushed the same way. Religion urged giving; advertising urges getting, and it sells identity as much as products. Trainers, phones and clothes are pitched as ways of saying who you are: “my style’s me”. Markets tend to feed the “I”, because a self that is still being built keeps finding something new to buy.

Later still, older values like Stoic restraint lost ground to a culture of talking things through. Self-care, therapy and therapy apps are now part of everyday language. Where people were once expected to endure, the modern instinct is to explore what you feel and why.

Art shows the same turn. Much medieval art praised the divine. Today a great deal of music, film and online art is personal expression: think of Billie Eilish’s inward-looking lyrics, or the “my creation” posts around digital art.

Each of these moved meaning a little further from “we” towards “I”. Technology then made the movement louder.

Social Media and AI

The biggest amplifier arrived with social media. MySpace launched in 2003 and Facebook in 2004. By early 2025 there were about 5.24 billion social media user accounts, close to two-thirds of the world’s population (DataReportal, 2025). In twenty years, a stage for the self went from novelty to normal.

How feeds work matters as much as how big they are. A study of more than 560,000 tweets on gun control, climate change and same-sex marriage found that each moral and emotional word in a tweet raised its retweets by about 20% (Brady and colleagues, 2017). Posts that stir feeling travel further. The feed learns what moves you and shows you more of it, so one shared public square becomes millions of personal ones.

AI adds a quieter boost. People use tools like Grok and ChatGPT to write their bios, polish their posts and make their own images and memes. The output is made to measure: “AI made this for me”. Social media gave the self a stage, and AI helps it produce more for that stage, faster and more polished. It is likely to speed the shift up further.

What It Changes

When meaning rests on the self, disagreement turns personal, and politics becomes “my truth” against “yours”. Research on how political posts spread shows the cost. A study of about 2.7 million posts on Twitter and Facebook, from news outlets and members of the US Congress, found that each word about the other political side raised the odds of a post being shared by about 67% (Rathje, Van Bavel and van der Linden, 2021). That was a far stronger effect than negative or moral-emotional words had. Hostility to “them” is rewarded with reach.

Personal bonds lean the same way. Marriage was once framed as a sacrament and family as a duty, tying “we” to a larger purpose. Today the individual’s needs tend to lead: “self-love” is a common theme, and posts like “I left for me” find a sympathetic audience. Relationships have not collapsed, but they lean more towards “me” than “us”.

With the self at the helm, meaning can feel less steady. Making your own meaning can be a heavy load. There is real creative energy, with people making things, starting things and sharing their own paths. There is also strain, in posts like “I’m numb” or “what’s the point”. When meaning was given, people could lean on it. When it has to be made, the person making it also has to hold it up. The constant flood of content adds to the load and leaves less room to reflect.

Conclusion

The evidence is partial, but it points one way. American books used “I” more and “we” less over half a century. Individualism rose across 78 countries as they grew richer. Online, emotion and hostility to the other side travel furthest.

This is not simply good or bad, and the evidence doesn’t say where it goes next; it only shows the shape of now. Next time you scroll, notice how much of it is “I”, how much is “we”, and where your own “my” fits into a wider “we”.

There is one more change, and it is the one my book is about. When meaning has to be made and held up by the self, one question gets louder: am I enough? Nothing outside the self can answer it, so it never closes. The framework explains how that question works, and what helps.

References

This essay was first drafted with Grok in April 2025. Its original figures came from Grok’s own estimates and could not be checked, so in October 2026 they were removed and replaced with the published research below.

• Brady, W. J., Wills, J. A., Jost, J. T., Tucker, J. A. and Van Bavel, J. J. (2017). Emotion shapes the diffusion of moralized content in social networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(28), 7313–7318.
• DataReportal and Kepios (2025). Digital 2025: Global Overview Report.
• Rathje, S., Van Bavel, J. J. and van der Linden, S. (2021). Out-group animosity drives engagement on social media. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(26).
• Santos, H. C., Varnum, M. E. W. and Grossmann, I. (2017). Global increases in individualism. Psychological Science, 28(9), 1228–1239.
• Twenge, J. M., Campbell, W. K. and Gentile, B. (2013). Changes in pronoun use in American books and the rise of individualism, 1960–2008. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 44(3), 406–415.