As I watch my Instagram feed flood with photos of beaming girls and boys with soft smiles, I can’t help but think that this app revolves around painting a false picture of ourselves.

We spend our most eventful days scrolling through hundreds of all-too similar photos, looking for the one that will earn us the most approval from our followers. We edit our flaws and filter our lives until we resemble overly-cheerful puppets.

I often find myself wondering why we put on this front for people we hardly know, why we care so much about the opinion of a “number.”

This need to seek approval from our peers has gotten out of control. We no longer focus on what is best for ourselves, but instead on what will look best to others.

If there’s one thing I’ve gathered, it’s that measuring the quality of one’s life by their Instagram is one of the most insensitive, inaccurate things you can do. One’s happiness is not determined by the smiles they bare in their photos or the amount of vacations they take. Some of the people who appear the happiest online are the one’s that are struggling the most.

Sometimes I find myself scrambling to find a photo to post in hopes of giving others the illusion that everything is fine. Whether it’s a throwback from the beach or a picture of my best friends and I fake laughing, I’m always looking for something to fill the gaps in my life, even if it’s something as unimportant as 200 likes.

The next time you’re about to show your friend a “perfect” person on Instagram, I urge you to look past their looks and see them as a human with problems just like ours. Pretty appearances do not equal pretty lives.