The world traveler. The happy couple. The party goer. The artist. The book reader. The hip coffee shop goer. Scroll through Instagram photos, Twitter updates, and Facebook statuses and you’re bound to see these seemingly perfect, exciting, and full lives. Afterward, you only feel dissatisfied with your own. Your own life feels average, mediocre, boring even, so you check Facebook to see the milestones and accomplishments of all your friends. You’re bored with your own relationship, so you like the photos of your friends on dates. Your own house seems ugly, so you design your ideal home on Pinterest. Everyone just seems more talented, more adventurous, more attractive, more creative, and more exciting than you.

Time and time again we use social media to escape the reality of our own lives. Our own normalcy seems pathetic in light of the shiny, perfect lives on Instagram. When our own lives are anything less than these “perfect” lives, we’re even more discontent. Daily life is a bore in comparison to the excitement that others show-off all over social media. We log off and wonder why nothing ever satisfies, why nothing seems exciting, why everything is hopeless.

Then, finally, you’re excited about something. You have to post about it. You have to share it. You need the validation of likes, the affirmation of comments on a screen. You finally have a Pinterest-worthy moment, and you feel that the only way in which you can truly experience it is by flaunting it online. You have to prove it everyone, to show off the perfect version of your self. You want to feel “connected” so you tell your hundreds of friends about your life milestone, your relationship, or your coffee.

Yet again, life goes back to normal, and yet again, you’re bored. If it’s anything less than the lives you see on Pinterest, it’s not good enough. Even when we are with our friends, we dread the silence and fear the stillness. We’ve grown so accustomed to a constant stream of noise that any lull in the conversation necessitates that we check our Instagram for the mini rush of adrenaline that comes from another "like." We long for connection as we sit around the table with our faces lit by the soft bluish glow of our smart phones, but can never fully-devote our attention to those sitting across from us. Spending so much time drowning in the endless stream of “perfect” moments on Facebook, we forget how to connect in the average moments, the normal ones. We use social media as a one-way street between our own lives and the public world, seeking connection but finding none.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I find nothing inherently wrong with technology or social media. I have a Facebook account, I post photos on Instagram, and I regularly use my smartphone. However, I think we’ve stopped using these resources as tools for connection and have begun using them for comparison. Rather than connecting to a community of people we love, we compare our own lives to the hundreds we find on our Facebook feeds, all of which seem to be loaded with excitement. Seeing the pretty lives on social media will always leave us dissatisfied because everyone posts about the highs, but never the lows. We use social media to display only our finest moments, never our worst. We feel like the only ones not travelling the world, not reading every book, or not dating the perfect person. It is no wonder that this makes us discontent.

Good news: the beauty of life is not in witty Facebook statuses, perfectly composed twitter updates in less than 140 characters, or hip Instagram photos. The lives we want don’t even exist. The shiny Pinterest life is a sham. And that’s a good thing, because the real, the gritty, the messy, and the difficult life is infinitely more rewarding.

So let’s use social media to connect, not to compare to one another; to foster community, not to build carefully construed public images of the lives we want. “Life” will always look better on the Internet, but it’s never real. The exciting lives on social media are the lives people want others to think they have. Real lives, the everyday ones, the normal ones, the genuine ones, are where true community can flourish, not in the picture perfect moments on Instagram.

The best lives can’t be depicted in one photo, post, or update—and don’t even need to be.

Article originally posted on https://andymarderian.wordpress.com