Stop Comparing Your Life To Your Friends’ Social Media Accounts

Let’s face it: whether you’ve fallen into the mundane 9-5 routine of sitting at a desk and staring a computer screen all day or are trying to kill time in that super boring lecture you really didn’t want to take, chances are good you turn to social media to relieve you of your boredom. It is almost guaranteed that in order to wake yourself up in the morning mentally and adjust your eyes to the natural lighting, you dim that iPhone screen and scroll though that newsfeed to catch up on the latest drama before embarking on your real world journey. Namaste. You may even spend an extra few minutes in the parking lot checking your twitter feed before you actually get out and start your day. Don’t even pretend that you haven’t been caught taking a Snapchat selfie in your car or at your desk during your down time.

I will never say that social media is a bad thing. It’s great! But as you scroll through each avenue of social media to escape the reality that you have actually entered the real world, you probably see how much fun everyone else is having and you doubt your success. You begin to second guess your most recent good review or new client referral. You begin to lose confidence in your own work because you see the leaps and bounds that others are making in their own professional endeavors, and where are you? Floundering. Scrolling Facebook. Seeped in your own jealousy.
You need to stop doing this, because what you don’t see on people’s timelines is that everyone’s life is a little bit mundane sometimes. Really. They just aren’t tweeting about it, because, well, it gets boring fast. Imagine if you woke up every morning and read a news feed consisting of only “Slept through my alarm again #oops” “Fell asleep watching TV last night #rager ” or “Big day of doing laundry and grocery shopping ahead of me #dontstopmenow.” And even if people do post these things, it’s usually with a fair amount of self-deprecating humor attached to it. Real amount of FOMO there, right?

The great thing about the world of online persona is that you can literally edit your life to make it seem better than it is. You are able to pick and choose what you post about and add a nice little Instagram-filtered photo to go right along with it. On social media, everything is coming up Sutro. We are all guilty of doing this, really: every time I go on a vacation, I make sure to snap a photo of the scenery and upload it right to Facebook.We anticipate the likes and comments that will follow because in that moment, we finally feel like we are the ones that are being envied. No one deliberately tries to make people feel like their own lives suck, they do it because no one cares about what they ate for breakfast… unless a shirtless man delivered them a gourmet breakfast in bed, of course. (In that case, please ‘gram that immediately, with zero shame.)

The key thing to be mindful of here is the hard truth that everyone’s life is a little bit boring sometimes. If life weren’t boring, than we wouldn’t appreciate how much fun we are having when we actually leave our 9-5 and reap the benefits of being financially able to go out and have a good time. We live in a world where we must work for and earn the successes that we are granted. Be mindful that even if your Facebook friends are heiresses of the throne or just genuinely extremely smart and dedicated, their success should not be compared to yours.

The perception that we have of ourselves is more critical than the way the rest of the world views us. Give yourself the benefit of the doubt. You are working hard and one day, at your own pace, you will feel like you have reached your fullest potential. Stop comparing your life to others by looking at their social media pages, it is an edited persona of themselves and they have left out the mundane that no one would care to follow or “like”. Don’t let a few hundred measly pixels make you doubt your success.