How many times have you caught yourself scrolling down your feed either on Instagram or Facebook and end up comparing your life to other people’s? Sometimes on a day that all you could do was eat right and finish the night with no dirty dishes left to be washed, you find out that your third cousin has gotten a scholarship with all included for a PhD in Harvard and she is also in a relationship with an astronaut! Are you a sad person for feeling bad? Is your cousin a show off? How about a bit of both?
People nowadays, with the advent of smartphones and better mobile web services, are sharing (and sometimes oversharing) every aspect of their daily routines. On the greener side, some post pictures of a cool vacation in Paris or a job trip to London, while others sometimes find little gems in their own hometowns and document it on a temporary story post. So far, so normal. Right? Comparing to a brighter shade of green that you can find in some serial social media sharers, yes. Some people, despite not being neither an influencer, nor a public person, have the need of documenting every step they take all the time: the gym they attended, the food they ate, the work they did and the endless love declarations about their fantastic and perfect partner. They only post overly positive texts, sometimes full of religious messages, to backup how fantastic their life is and how grateful they are for it. The good vibes only. How realistic is that and most importantly: who lives like that?
On the other side, the not so green one, is our average Joe. The person that posts a few grievances on Twitter. The one that complains about their neighbors being too loud at a late hour on a Tuesday but doesn’t care when they throw a party on the weekend, because everyone needs some fun. They are the ones that dream of that Paris trip, but due to financial issues, compromise to a visit at the local beach instead. They tend not to overpost and keep a lot of updates to be exchanged on direct messages or not so public groups. They sometimes rant that things are not doing so well though, and then the very green side people come to say that they need to focus on the positive and they shouldn’t be so negative. Rarely you’ll see the other way around, a person being negative about the social media over achievers.
Why do we overshare? Because we want to show the world how happy we are or because we want the others to envy us or even cause them sadness? Research shows that Instagram is one of the social media that causes the most depressive feeling on its users. Dare to say it is because of the “insta worthy shots of a perfect life”? How perfect are those moments? For real? Many times we get carried away by the staged poses and filtered landscapes and forget that people are only a fraction of what they want us to see. No one is perfect from up close. Maybe you are feeling sad that you haven’t accomplished much lately in comparison to that friend who got promoted to a super nice job. Maybe what you don’t know is that, despite the really cool post with your friend saying how grateful they are for the universe giving the best back when you wish for it, they actually hate the job and only took it for the money they need to pay the bank loan they took last year to finance their car. Maybe the grumpy Tweets are the only vent a friend has and they may have other cool stuff going on that they will share with you over a WhatsApp message instead of a public post.
How many times have you been the picture perfect person on Instagram or the one that makes a thread of sad tales on Twitter? There are days and days and we need to stop comparing ourselves to others in order to measure how happy or unhappy we are. We need to remember that no one is either depressive nor happy all the time and what we choose to publish/post is just the tip of the iceberg of what we really are. We have to stop imposing ourselves deadlines, countdowns, conditions to live and let live. Sometimes it should be live and let it leave you. Enough with the conditional happiness that feeds on phony smiles and fake hellos all over social media.
If you are happy and feel like it is a good thing to talk about it, do it! If you are sad and feel that sharing is the way to help you feeling better, do it too! People have different timing for everything and because something happened to someone at age 21 it doesn’t mean it cannot happen to you when you at age 32. Do things for yourself and for your own benefit. They key is: do not feel obligated to post anything that is not actually true or to distort the reality, for better or worse, just to make people think you are a certain way. You do you and please, remember to take care of your own garden instead of looking through the fences for your neighbor’s one…
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