I compare my behind-the-scenes to everyone else’s premiere, my rough draft to their published version, my 3 AM anxiety to their 3 PM success announcements. This is the mathematics of misery: measuring my unfiltered reality against their carefully curated presentation and wondering why I always come up short.
Everyone else appears to glide through life in perfectly lit moments while I stumble through mine in harsh fluorescent reality. Their relationships look effortless, their careers seem inevitable, their happiness appears natural and sustainable. My life, by contrast, feels like a series of barely managed catastrophes punctuated by moments of accidental competence.
But I’m comparing incomparable data sets. I know every moment of my own struggle—every doubt, every failure, every time I’ve pretended to understand something I didn’t, every occasion when I’ve smiled while dying inside. But I only see others’ greatest hits albums, their highlight reels, their carefully selected evidence that life is working out exactly as planned.
The weight of this false comparison is crushing because it makes my normal human experience feel like personal failure. If everyone else is naturally confident, then my self-doubt must be defective. If everyone else’s relationships are always happy, then my conflicts must indicate incompetence. If everyone else’s children are consistently delightful, then my parenting struggles must reveal my inadequacy.
Social media has industrialized this comparison, creating endless opportunities to measure my interior against everyone else’s exterior, my process against their outcomes, my Monday morning against their Saturday night. We’re all editors now, cutting out the boring parts, the painful parts, the human parts, showing only the footage that supports the narrative we want to project.
The edited life creates a world of false competition where everyone is measuring their reality against everyone else’s mythology. No wonder we feel inadequate—we’re comparing our unedited experience to everyone else’s director’s cut.
Maybe the antidote isn’t to stop comparing but to compare more accurately—my struggles to the struggles they don’t share, my humanity to their humanity rather than their performance, my real life to what their real life probably actually looks like when the cameras stop rolling.
Tonight I remember that everyone has blooper reels they don’t share, that everyone struggles with things they don’t post about, that the people whose lives look perfect from the outside are probably comparing their inside to someone else’s outside, creating an infinite chain of unnecessary inadequacy.
