Your Life vs Their Highlights: Escaping the Scroll
At 3 AM, I found myself comparing my life to a travel blogger who posts sunrise photos from different countries every week. I don’t even like traveling, but there I was, measuring my contentment against someone’s curated adventure, feeling inadequate for finding joy in my morning tea on our small balcony instead of on a Balinese mountaintop.
This is the weight we carry now: the crushing burden of everyone else’s best moments, served to us as casual entertainment, consumed as evidence of our own insufficiency.
I remember when comparison required effort. You had to seek out evidence of others’ success, visit their homes, attend their celebrations, actively inquire about their lives. Now it arrives unbidden, scrolling past in an endless stream of optimized living, each post a tiny reminder that someone, somewhere, is doing better than you are.
Happy doesn’t use social media much, and sometimes I envy her immunity to this digital poison. She measures her day against her own expectations, her happiness against her own needs, her success against her own definition. She doesn’t know that the woman from her college posts gym selfies every morning, or that her cousin apparently takes family vacations that cost more than our annual income. Happy’s contentment exists in a vacuum that I’ve contaminated with other people’s performances.
The cruelest part is that we know it’s performance. We understand intellectually that social media shows highlight reels, not daily realities. Yet the knowing doesn’t protect us from the feeling, the slow erosion of satisfaction that comes from constant exposure to curated excellence. We see the perfect kitchen and forget that we don’t need granite countertops to feel at home. We see the exotic vacation and forget that we chose financial responsibility over adventure. We see the career achievements and forget that we chose family time over ambition.
I think about the life I’m not sharing online—the mornings when I struggle to get out of bed, the arguments Happy and I have over money, the times I lose patience with Arash, the weeks when my writing feels pointless, the fears that keep me awake at night. These aren’t Instagram moments, but they’re the texture of a real life, the unglamorous foundation on which actual happiness is built.
But the comparison machine doesn’t care about foundation. It only cares about the surface, and on the surface, everyone else seems to be winning.
Yesterday, I saw a post from someone I barely know—a former colleague—celebrating his promotion with a photo of champagne and city lights. For ten minutes, I spiraled into self-doubt about my own career choices, my instability, my failure to climb whatever ladder he was climbing. Then I remembered: I chose this life. I chose flexibility over security, writing over corporate success, time with family over networking events. But in that moment of comparison, my choices felt like failures.
The weight compounds. It’s not just one person’s success that triggers the inadequacy—it’s the cumulative effect of seeing dozens of curated lives every day, each one excelling in different areas, creating an impossible composite of perfection that no real human could achieve. We’re comparing our whole lives to the combined highlight reels of hundreds of people, and wondering why we feel insufficient.
Arash is growing up in this environment, where comparison is ambient, where other people’s performances are background radiation. I watch him sometimes, looking at other kids’ toys online, other families’ adventures, and I see the beginnings of that familiar dissatisfaction, that sense that what he has isn’t enough because someone else has more, has different, has better. How do I teach him to find contentment when the world insists on showing him everything he’s missing?
The algorithmic cruelty is that the platforms show us exactly the kind of content most likely to make us feel inadequate. If I’m insecure about parenting, I’ll see perfect parent posts. If I’m worried about money, I’ll see luxury lifestyle content. The machine has learned to feed our insecurities, to monetize our self-doubt, to profit from our comparison addiction.
Sometimes I close all the apps and sit with Happy on our balcony, watching the street below. Our view isn’t picturesque—there’s no ocean or mountain, just people going about their ordinary lives. But in those moments, without the interference of other people’s curated experiences, I remember what contentment actually feels like. I remember that my life, unfiltered and unposed, has its own particular beauty.
The hardest realization is that comparison steals presence. While I’m measuring my vacation against someone else’s, I’m not enjoying my own. While I’m envying someone’s career success, I’m not appreciating the flexibility of my current situation. While I’m wishing for someone else’s family dynamics, I’m not fully engaging with the family I have. Comparison turns us into tourists in our own lives, always looking elsewhere for something better.
I’ve started experimenting with gratitude as an antidote to comparison. When I see something online that triggers envy, I try to name three things about my life that bring me joy. It’s not always effective—sometimes the comparison wins—but it’s practice in redirecting attention from what I lack to what I have.
The truth is, we’re comparing our internal experience to everyone else’s external performance. We know our own struggles, doubts, and failures intimately, but we only see others’ successes. We know the full novel of our own complicated life, but we only see carefully chosen paragraphs from everyone else’s story.
Maybe the real comparison should be between who we are today and who we were yesterday. Maybe the only meaningful measure is our own growth, our own progress toward whatever we’ve defined as a life well-lived. Maybe the weight of comparison lifts when we remember that we’re not in competition with anyone except our former selves.
But knowing this and feeling this are different things. The comparison machine is powerful, the curated content is compelling, and the weight is real. Perhaps the best we can do is notice when we’re carrying it, acknowledge its presence, and gently set it down, as often as necessary, for as long as we can.
In the end, the only life we’re actually living is our own. The only happiness that matters is the one we create in our own small space, with our own imperfect people, through our own particular choices. Everyone else’s highlight reel is just that—a reel, a performance, a carefully edited version of a life as messy and uncertain as our own.
The real competition is not with others but with our own tendency to look away from what we have in search of what we think we want. And maybe, in our own unposted moments, in our own uncurated contentment, we’re winning in ways no algorithm will ever measure.
