“We never cease wanting what we want, whether it’s good for us or not.”
– Stephen King from Full Dark, No Stars

You wake up in the morning. You’re feeling pretty good about what you’re going to do today because the day is bright and shiny and full of possibilities (unless you’re hungover in which case you put your head under the pillow and wish you hadn’t woken up at all). You roll over, grab your phone, and immediately bring up Facebook.

And oh, you wish you hadn’t done that.

Your Facebook wall is full of photos of things you’re not doing. Traveling, saving money, losing weight, working at a job you absolutely love, getting 2nd place in a bike race, going to Burning Man, taking your amazing dog for an amazing hike and hanging out with all of your amazingly happy awesome super smiley friends.

Fuck. What were you doing today? Suddenly, it doesn’t seem to matter all that much.

Now you’re starting your day thinking about all of the cool awesome life experiences you could be having that you’re not having. Just to make it worse, you decide to go on instagram or twitter, because at this point, who cares? You already feel bad about your own life and your own choices.

If you’re like me, this happens every morning. The routine ‘let-me-compare-myself-to-everyone-else-even-though-I-know-it-isn’t-real-but-now-I-feel-bad-anyway’ morning confidence slayer that for some reason seems to define how us twenty-somethings feel about life. Even if you’re pretty happy with how your life is going right now, there is still always someone doing something better.

I have two thoughts I’d like to get across on this topic. They aren’t new thoughts, because I’ve read blogs about this exact topic before, but they are my thoughts so if you’re reading this, you’re going to listen to them anyway, despite their lack of uniqueness.

One: These Facebook lives are filtered. They are exactly what your friends want you to see and nothing more. The screaming match they got into with their friend the other day? Definitely not part of a post. Smiling at work when they really want to be slapping someone for their stupidity? You can’t put a ‘Lark’ filter on that one to make it look nicer.

So why do I sit around caring about what other people are posting? Probably because even though I know it’s only the good parts of their lives, I still want those good parts! I want to take all of their amazing moments and shove them into my 24 hour day so I can feel as happy as they look in that photo.

Realistically, I can’t do all those things and 1) still have money and 2) get any sleep, ever. Also, if I realllly wanted to do all those things, I would actively make plans to do them. Which is why I’ve done more hiking this summer, because I got sick of all the stupidly beautiful hiking photos from other people. I wanted those hiking photos, so I set out to get some.

This leads me into thought number two, which is: If you are sitting around looking at your Facebook feed now, you might as well be productive about it. If there is something out there you are just dying to do, you should start working towards doing it. It’s not useful to yourself (or anyone around who is going to listen to you complain) to sit around and simply look at these things without actually doing anything about it.

Today, my feed seems to be filled with amazing photos and videos of Burning Man. It’s gotten me thinking that yes, I really, really do want to go someday. So instead of just waiting until this time rolls around every year and complaining about how I didn’t go and about how I don’t have enough money to go, I should pick a year I want to go and start planning and saving now. Then eventually I can be one of those people who is annoying you on your Facebook feed with all my awesome photos of BM.

I don’t think we’ll ever be able to stop comparing ourselves to others. I’m not writing this entry to say, “we all know it’s semi-fake so just stop comparing yourself, mmkay?” That’s unrealistic. It’s like telling my generation that we should all delete our Facebook accounts tomorrow and thinking that’s somehow going to happen.

I’m writing this because instead of uselessly comparing yourself to your friends and sabotaging your own happiness, take a look at that feed of yours and ask yourself what you really want to be doing. It’s probably something that takes some planning to achieve, but likely it’s something you can do if you put forth the effort. You can’t help but compare, and you can’t change what other people post, but you can change what you choose to do in your own life because of it.