In most networks of people, most people have fewer friends than their friends do. This takes no shyness to manage, only arithmetic, and Scott Feld set it out in 1991. Picture four people: one knows the other three, who know only that one. The average is one and a half friends each. But three of the four look across at their only friend and see someone with three, and just one person in the group sees less than they have. Someone with a hundred friends turns up in a hundred other people’s idea of what normal looks like, and someone with one friend turns up once. So nobody is misreading what they see. You were never comparing yourself with people. You were comparing yourself with people weighted by how easy they are to meet.