Everyone Looks Fine. That's the Problem. | Part 2
There are days when scrolling through other people's lives can leave you with the peculiar feeling that you are the only person who hasn't quite figured things out.
Someone has been promoted. Someone has bought a house. Someone is going on holiday. Someone has just become engaged. Someone looks fantastic. Someone's children seem happy and confident. Someone has started a successful business. Someone is renovating their kitchen. Someone appears to have found the elusive balance between career, family, health, friendships and enough time to keep their home looking immaculate and you are sitting in your own ordinary life wondering why everybody else seems to be doing so well. You start to feel that you are somehow behind.
The problem, of course, is that you aren't actually seeing everybody else's lives. You are only seeing the parts of their lives they have chosen to show you. Most of us understand this intellectually. We know that social media is curated. We know that people don't usually post photographs of the argument they had immediately before the photograph was taken. They don't tend to share the rejected job applications, the difficult conversations, the financial worries or the nights when they lay awake wondering whether they have made the right decisions or the trouble they are having with their children.
We know that one photograph isn't the whole story. And yet, knowing that doesn't necessarily stop comparison. The reason may be that comparison isn't entirely rational. We don't simply look at a photo and consciously remind ourselves that it is incomplete. We absorb an impression. We see patterns. We notice what appears to be working for other people and, particularly when we are already uncertain about our own lives, we can begin to interpret their apparent success as evidence of our own shortcomings.
Someone else's promotion becomes a reminder that our career isn't moving quickly enough. Someone else's relationship makes us question our own. Someone else's body can make us more critical of ours. Someone else's holiday can suddenly make our own life seem dull. Their life becomes a measuring stick and we begin measuring ourselves against it. This is where comparison becomes more than simple curiosity or admiration. It starts to influence how we feel about ourselves.
Research on social media and mental health has found a complex relationship rather than a simple cause-and-effect story. Social media can provide connection, support and community but certain patterns of use, particularly social comparison and passive consumption, can be associated with poorer wellbeing for some people. The effects are not identical for everyone, which is precisely why the question of how we use these platforms matters. This may be why simply telling people to “stop comparing yourself” isn't particularly helpful. Comparison is part of being human. The more interesting question is what happens after we compare.
We can see someone doing something wonderful and feel inspired by it. We can think, “I'd love to try that,” or “That's something I might like to work towards” or maybe it starts to inspire goals of our own. In this way, comparison can give us information about our own desires.
But there is another version. We see the same thing and think, “Why don't I have that?” Then the observation becomes a judgement. The other person's success becomes evidence that we are behind. This is particularly painful because we tend to compare ourselves most intensely in areas where we already feel vulnerable. If we're worried about money, we notice other people's houses or cars. If we're insecure about our appearance, we notice other people's bodies. If we're questioning our relationship, we notice couples who look happy. If we're uncertain about our career, everyone else's achievements suddenly become very visible.
We don't compare our whole life with their whole life. We take one area in which we feel uncertain and place it beside one area in which someone else appears to be thriving. It is an impossible comparison.
We know everything about our own internal experience. We know our doubts, our mistakes, our disappointments and the things we haven't told anyone. With other people, we usually see the surface. We are comparing our behind-the-scenes with someone else's edited version and then we wonder why we feel inadequate.
There is another layer to this that I think deserves more attention. The pressure doesn't only come from seeing other people succeed. It comes from the sense that there is a particular timeline we are supposed to be following. I hear this in my practice every week. By a certain age, we should have achieved certain things. We should have a career we are proud of, enough money, a relationship, perhaps children, perhaps a home, perhaps a body we feel comfortable in. We should be confident and emotionally healthy and know what we are doing with our lives.
But who decided? The imaginary timeline can be incredibly powerful, even though it is largely made up. Life doesn't unfold according to a universal schedule. People change careers at forty. They become parents at different ages. They leave relationships that once looked successful from the outside. They start businesses, abandon businesses, move countries, return home, discover new ambitions and lose old ones. Some people reach milestones early in life and discover they don't make them happy. Others spend years believing they are behind before realising they were simply taking a different route.
Comparison makes all of this more difficult because it encourages us to think in terms of position rather than direction. Am I ahead? Am I behind? Am I doing better than them? But are these really useful questions.
A more meaningful question might be: Am I living in a way that reflects what matters to me? This question is much harder to answer because there is no universal scoreboard.
Success might mean earning more for one person, while for another it might mean having enough time to see their children grow up. For another it means meaningful work. For someone else, it means freedom, creativity, stability, community or simply a quieter, secure life.
We can easily spend years pursuing achievements that look impressive from the outside without ever asking whether they are actually the things we value. This is one reason comparison can be so exhausting. It doesn't just make us feel behind. It can distract us from deciding where we actually want to go.
Maybe you don't actually want their life. What you might want is the freedom you imagine they have. Maybe it isn't their career you envy, but the recognition you believe comes with it. Maybe you don't actually want their life. What you might want is the freedom you imagine they have. Maybe it isn't their career you envy, but the recognition you believe comes with it. You may not want their relationship at all, but the sense of being loved and secure that you imagine exists within it. Maybe too you don't really want their house, but the financial safety you associate with owning it. When we look closely, the thing we envy is sometimes not the thing itself, but what we believe it represents.
This can be useful information. It can tell us something about what we are missing or longing for. The challenge is to listen to that information without turning it into a judgement about our worth. Someone else's success does not make you unsuccessful. Someone else's beauty does not make you unattractive. Someone else's happiness does not mean that you have failed to create a happy life and someone else's timeline is not evidence that you are behind.
Maybe we need to be more careful about what we allow other people's lives to mean about our own. We can admire without diminishing ourselves. We can be inspired without becoming inadequate. We can want something different without deciding that what we have is worthless and sometimes we can simply close the app, look around at the life that is actually in front of us, and remember that ordinary life contains things that photographs rarely capture: familiarity, history, private jokes, difficult conversations, quiet mornings, people who know where you've come from and the small routines that make a life feel like yours.
Those things may never look impressive in a photograph. They may not generate applause but they can still be meaningful.
Maybe the goal isn't to stop comparing altogether. Maybe it's simply to notice when comparison has stopped helping us understand what we want and has started convincing us that we are not enough.
And when that happens, we might ask ourselves a different question: If nobody could see my life, what would I choose to do with it?
This question takes us away from the audience and back to ourselves. It reminds us that a meaningful life doesn't have to be impressive from the outside. It doesn't have to fit someone else's timeline, look a certain way in photographs or come with the achievements we once thought we were supposed to have.
Sometimes the life that matters most is the one that feels right when nobody else is watching.
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