What Happens When You Can Watch Hundreds of People Living Better Lives Every Day?

Sometimes I think about how much the world has changed right in front of us.

Before social media, most of the people we compared ourselves with were people we actually knew. Our neighbours, friends, classmates, coworkers, relatives, and the people we saw regularly.

Our world in terms of social circle was limited.

But today, that limit is almost gone.

With a very few clicks, you can see hundreds of people every day. You can watch billionaires show their homes, influencers show their bodies, couples show their relationships, travellers show their vacations, and people your own age show how much money they are making.

And after seeing all of this every day, it becomes easy to wonder if “Am I doing enough with my life?”

Setting Other People's Lives as Standard

If someone is having an ordinary day.

Like waking up, going to work or school, coming home, eating dinner, and watching some television. Nothing terrible happened. Nothing amazing happened either.

But then they open Instagram and see.

The first person is travelling somewhere beautiful.

The second just bought a new house.

Someone else got engaged.

Another person started a successful business.

Suddenly, the ordinary day does not feel so ordinary anymore.

Everything was perfectly fine five minutes ago and now they start feeling something is missing or lacking in thier life.

Nothing about life changed only the perception of it did.

That is one of the strange things about constant comparison.

We Compare Our Reality With Someone Else's Highlight Reel

The biggest problem is that we rarely see people's complete lives online.

We see the vacation, not the stressful flight.

We see the promotion, not the years of rejection that came before it.

We see the perfect body, not the pressure or struggle behind maintaining it.

We see the beautiful house, but we may know nothing about the mortgage.

Social media gives us small pieces of people's lives, but we experience our own lives from beginning to end.

We know our bad days, boring days, mistakes, insecurities, financial worries, family problems, and moments when we feel completely lost.

So we end up comparing our full reality with a carefully selected part of someone else's reality.

The Pressure to Constantly Improve Yourself

There is another message that social media often sends us, You should always be improving.

Improve your body.

Improve your skin.

Improve your career.

Improve your finances.

Improve your relationships.

Wake up earlier.

Work harder.

Read more.

Exercise more.

Travel more.

Become your “best self.”

Some of this advice can be useful, but when you see it constantly, self-improvement can slowly turn into self-criticism, you may start feeling guilty for resting, and think you are wasting time when you are simply taking a break.

But you do not need to turn every part of your life into a project.

Sometimes a bad day is simply a bad day.

You do not always need a lesson, a productivity hack, or a glow-up.

The Dopamine Loop

Social media platforms are also designed to keep us coming back.

You never quite know what you will see next, and that unpredictability can keep the brain interested in continuing.

This can create a cycle where you keep reaching for your phone even when you did not originally plan to spend much time on it.

For younger people especially, constant scrolling can become a normal part of everyday life.

It is what happens when your brain gets used to constantly receiving something new.

A quiet moment can start to feel uncomfortable, even sitting with your own thoughts can feel boring.

Advertising Adds Another Layer

Social media does not only show us other people's lives, it also shows us thousands of things we are told we need like a new outfit, better skincare routine etc.

A product that will supposedly make our lives easier or make us look better.

Sometimes the message is direct, other times it is hidden inside someone's lifestyle.

You see someone looking happy in a beautiful home and then see an advertisement for the furniture inside it.

Slowly, happiness can start to look like something you can purchase.

And the list of things you need never seems to end.

What We Can Forget

Perhaps the biggest thing social media can make us forget is that a good life does not have to look impressive, a good life can be a quiet dinner with your family, laughing with an old friend, walking outside without taking a picture, reading a book on a rainy afternoon or sitting outside and watching the night sky.

None of these moments may get thousands of likes but they are priceless. Real life has always contained both good and bad.

We need difficult days to recognize peaceful ones. We need ordinary moments to appreciate extraordinary ones.

A life without problems does not exist and a life that looks perfect from the outside may not feel perfect on the inside.

So What Can We Do?

We do not need to delete every social media app or stop admiring other people's achievements.

Instead, we can become more aware of what happens inside us when we use them.

When you see someone else's life, ask yourself:

“Do I actually want this, or do I just feel like I should want it?”

There is a big difference.

You can admire someone's success without deciding that you are failing.

Most importantly, remember that you are allowed to build a life that looks good to you, even if it does not look impressive to everyone else.

Social media gives us access to hundreds of lives, but we still have only one life of our own to live.

And sometimes, the healthiest thing we can do is stop watching everyone else's life long enough to notice whether we actually like our own.