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.???
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.
People always had variable schedules. The phone has always been a disturbing projection of one’s presence into another person’s home or office. But if you want to have connections to people who don’t live in your house, you pay the price of a few seconds of unreasoning terror as you listen to the ringing and think 'Oh, gods, I’m such an asshole for invading their lives. What if they’re trying to put out a grease fire and my phone call makes them feel like they have to let their house burn down with their pets and kids in it to answer my pathetic, needy demands for their attention? What if they’re having sex and answer anyway so I’m just this disembodied presence in the middle of their coitus? What if they–" and then they answer and are happy to hear from you. Even if they don’t spend six hours on the line, letting them know you had a joke to share with them can make both of your days better and you can say, ‘No worries. Call me back when you’re on the road and we can BS about ostriches for your half an hour of commute time. It’ll at least be better than listening to the news.’