Some days I open Instagram and it feels like everyone is winning except me.
New job. New car. New trip. Someone’s “6 months of consistency” post. Someone else casually mentioning their salary hike like it’s nothing.
And for a few minutes, I genuinely feel like I’m falling behind in some race everyone else is running faster than me.
I’ll be honest, sometimes it’s not just comparison, it’s jealousy. Real, uncomfortable jealousy. The kind you don’t want to admit out loud because it feels petty, but it’s there.
Then I remind myself of a few things.
Nobody posts their bad days. The rejection emails, the loans, the burnout, the fights, the doubt at 2am, none of that makes it to the feed. What we’re comparing ourselves to is a highlight reel, not a full life.
Everyone’s timeline is different. Someone’s “success” at 22 might be someone else’s struggle at 22, and that’s fine. Racing against a timeline that isn’t yours is a losing game by definition.
The feeling is normal, but it’s not information. Jealousy tells you something matters to you, it doesn’t tell you that you’re behind. It just means you want something. That’s worth noticing, not spiraling over.
I don’t have this fully figured out. I still catch myself comparing sometimes. But I’m trying to remind myself that a feed is not a scoreboard, and I’m not actually competing with strangers online.
If you’ve ever felt this way, how do you deal with it? Genuinely asking, not just venting.???
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Very few people post depressing stuff on Instagram.
You are still alive. You have a smartphone and a data plan. You are clearly educated. You are healthy enough to think and type.
So realistically, I’d say that puts you miles ahead of most humans of the past and the present.
Some days I open Instagram
That’s the problem.
It’s literally in your hands to solve your problem. Don’t compare yourself to others and delete social media. It is that easy.
A ton of Instagram content is designed to amp up your insecurities and then sell you some course or whatever… lots of goofy activities going on like influencers banding together to rent massive houses and nice cars as the backdrop for some video about how they’re gajillionaires at 20 and you can be too if you just buy their course 🙄. And as you said for the real people on there who aren’t influencers there is a bias towards generally wanting to post the things that put themselves in the best light.
I only use Instagram these days when an old pal sends me a reel, the influencer to friend ratio is too high nowadays for my taste
Delete Instagram and be happy
I did but i feel less connected to everyone now. Still net positive I think
If you were ‘connected’ via instagram, you were not connected. You were pretending.
Probably accurate statment. It was nice to see what family members were doing but soon as I stopped it stopped mattering. Though even if it was pretending, liking photos and commenting felt like some involvement in their lives versus the 0 I do now.
Call them. Talk as humans with your mouth flaps. It’s weird now because people have fallen out of practice, but it’s always still an option to just connect like people have for thousands of years, and feels so much more meaningful than poking a like button.
Yeah that’s the answer but like I feel so weird about it. Used to be easy when we were kids but now ppl have variable schedules.
Like my SO has to schedule calls 3 months in advance with friends and then they talk whe. driving. I don’t think there has ever been a call where the friend was not driving somewhere. Another friend cant talk before 9 pm because of kids and we are in bed at 8pm. Its just one excuse after another.
Happy cake day!
Thank you!
I’m only just now feeling like my life is on track and I’m almost 30.
Meanwhile my partners friends both have a nice house, great jobs, and just had a baby. Everyone’s path is different man.
My advice is just do your best and enjoy the ride. Count all the good things in your life. Take a minute, put down your phone and just be with your thoughts.
Teeeechnically that’s envy, not jealousy. But only technically, the definition of jealousy has drifted over the centuries. Really it’s more of a fun fact about the original meaning of those words than a real correction.
They don’t post the bad stuff.
Personally we’re about to be homeless in like 2 months, we have a job but it doesn’t pay enough to get a room for rent (not even an apartment. just a room in somebody’s house.) and a car at the same time (and I’m kind of leaning towards the car because if we get sick and lose some income and can’t make rent it would be… a problem, and a car would be more affordable / easier to cut back on).
But nobody’s gonna post that kind of stuff on Instagram.
– Frost
For me, I do not have a use for social media. I don’t use Instagram, Facebook, or Snapchat. They’re all owned by big corporations who are known to spy on their users (+ they are actively developing consumer spy glasses which is kind of creepy), and I don’t feel a need to post my life on social media. Maybe you have a business or something and need that promotion, but most people probably don’t need it. I use a mix of Matrix, which is awesome, secure, decentralised, all that, and unfortunately WeChat, since I have some friends and family who live in mainland China, where WeChat is the most convenient option.
Although there are a lot of things that are not great about WeChat (Tencent having an effective monopoly in the Chinese market, they are likely snooping on messages, etc.) I do have to say their “Moments” idea is brilliant. It lets you post up to 9 images with a caption per post, and by default it’s only shown to your contacts, which is really cool! Maybe that’s something to do with restrictive Chinese regulations on the Internet, I dunno, but it’s kind of cool to see a curated set of images in a little feed of just people I actually know.
Right now, I have Matrix for connecting with the world, and WeChat for connecting with parts of my family as well as some of my friends that reside in mainland China. It isn’t the best, but it’s what works for me. Meta, Snapchat, etc. do not fit into that setup for me.
As I say, 99 failures and 1 success is 1 success to others. Some things take 9999 tries and some take one. But from the outside 999 failures and 1 win is 1 win.
If we’re heeding instagram photos, we’re too far gone to be helped, until we rise to some baseline of sense. Nothing else can work until we can at least provide that.
Because you’re not seeing their lives, you’re seeing a photo box.
If you wanted to you could come up with your own wonderful life of your own specifically for Instagram to chase clout as it were.
Nobody posts how shitty their life is typically.
why are you doing this?
Many people go into debt to keep up the appearance of success.
