The dominant ideology of Western aesthetics in life is existentialism: the idea of excelling by your own definition. But in order for this to be meaningful, "your definition" has to be socially informed, and yet by construction, it's not part of the theory. In some sense there's an essential tension between the need to be free and the need to not be insane. Unfortunately, succeeding according to a socially-informed but ill-defined set of criteria basically always reduces to being socially successful in one way or another, and it might be cheeky, but it's true, to point out that this is a perfectly reasonable metric of success... for philosophers. However, the fact is that everyone can't be socially successful, and the result is that many people who are motivated by existentialism in its popular form end up unsuccessful and unhappy.

Note that "social success" does not mean socializing; Paul Dirac was extremely socially successful, yet nearly incapable of socializing. And despite this it strikes me that he would have been less happy if he had not been one of the greatest physicists in history: introversion or even (possibly) autism is no antidote to vanity.

In light of this people point the blame at social media, but don't ideas matter?