As all of you are well aware, the two biggest media-streaming giants, Netflix and Hulu, released documentaries that investigated the Fyre Festival Scandal of 2017. For those of you living under a rock, this “luxurious” music festival, featuring A-list musicians and top tier social media influencers, enticed several millennials to invest thousands of dollars in a “once in a lifetime” experience. Unfortunately, upon their arrival to the Bahamian island, these hopeful young adults were greeted with soggy hurricane shelters, half-finished stages, and subpar cuisine.

Being slapped in the face with the complete antithesis of what they were promised, the drunken festival attendees immediately fell into an apocalyptic Lord of the Flies situation, fighting one another for dry mattresses and looting for goods.

But all of that is covered in the two trending documentaries. What is so alarming about this dramatic reversal of fortune? The fact that the general population of young adults are so willing to throw their savings toward meaningless events. Collecting millions of dollars, the producers of Fyre Festival involuntarily scammed countless fame-starved millennials and were responsible for a global laughing stock.

By pandering to a young audience with footage of models in bikinis, luxurious booze and boats, Fyre Media knew exactly how to draw in consumers. In modern day society, as Instragram and Twitter continue to progress in an upward trajectory, more and more impressionable individuals are being influenced by the content they see online. Suffocated by relentless images of airbrushed celebrities and influencers, along with their too-good-to-be-true lifestyles, the average young adult feels pressured to meet the same standards. The delusional desire to become “famous” grows evermore prevalent in today’s digitized social world, and the Fyre Festival proved what lengths some individuals are willing to take in order to have a taste of manufactured luxury.

Despite what is published on social media, not everything is what it seems. Unfortunately, those with the sufficient resources to even attend this Fyre event learned that lesson the hard way. As a subsequent result, the rest of the world laughed at their misfortune, and mocked the wealthy millennials for throwing their money away in pursuit of a life of opulence. While not everyone thinks as naively as the festival attendees, the Fyre Festival scandal illuminates the unhealthy mindset that is augmenting in first-world culture, and should raise concern for the large amount of power that online celebrities hold over the masses.