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Well, figure if you were top 5% in size/muscle when you were 15, then there were nineteen other fifteen year olds in Finland who looked at you and thought to themselves "Wow, that guy is bigger and stronger than me, I'm scrawny and weak!" It's an ordinal value, not an absolute one, so people are comparing themselves to others, and disproportionately everyone will compare themselves to the apex.
People tend to form durable internal identities during their youth, I would say 15 years old is pretty typical. Almost every male, whether you work out during that time or not, is smaller and scrawnier and weaker than he will be later, so at the time he is forming his internal sense of himself, he perceives the world that way. The typical fifteen year old boy compares himself to his father, he is smaller and weaker than his father. If he's not on a sports team, he is likely smaller and weaker than the kids who are on a sports team; if he is on a sports team, at 15 he is likely smaller and weaker than the older kids he plays with on the same team or at the same club. If a teenage boy has a job, he is likely working with adult men who are bigger and stronger than he is.
People don't tend to update those internal identities over time as quickly or as thoroughly as we ought to. For me, I went from rowing at 155# freshman year of college to getting into lifting and weighing around 195-205# every year since graduation, but my identity formed when I still thought of myself as smaller than that, and it takes conscious effort to think of myself as a heavyweight.
Yeah, I don't notice the 99% of dudes at Costco to compare myself to, I notice the 2 dudes who look like they can bench 3 plates.
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