You’re in your bed on a gross summer night. Instead of attempting to make plans, you decided to just stay in and watch Netflix. Realistically, there are only a couple of people at home that you want to see anyways, people that you’ve probably already seen. And it would’ve taken a lot of effort to make sure the plans actually happened because you’re all college kids and college kids are lazy, and last minute, especially when you have to drive to see each other and not just walk down the hall. But you’re in a good spot. You’re totally content to be wrapped in blankets comfortably in your own bed watching whatever show you’ve started binge watching this summer. You actually couldn’t be happier.
That is, until you make the terrible mistake of picking up your phone. And then you make the fatal mistake of opening social media. You see your friends from school that live near each other together on a Snapchat story. You see people you went to high school with at a party in someone’s basement on Instagram. Then, you start feeling bad for yourself. You start feeling like you’re having the worst, most lame summer ever. You feel like everyone else is having fun and you’re the only one not. When you do this, you’re failing to include one important variable in this seemingly awful equation. The nature of social media.
People only post what they want their friends and acquaintances to see on social media. They only post the highlights. So as you sit in your bed comparing your average night to someone’s best night, you’re doing yourself a disservice. When you see the fun thing that others are doing you neglect to remind yourself that these are all highlights that you’re seeing; this isn’t the norm. They captured the one moment that everyone seemed happy and was laughing. It isn’t always like that. You can remind yourself this because you know it firsthand, you do the same thing.
Whether we all do it consciously, or not, we post on social media to make ourselves look better. We post the pictures we look best in, doing the best thing, with the best people. This is all fine and good when we are the ones posting, but when we’re the ones scrolling through our feeds of these highlights it sucks -- especially when you have no highlights at that moment to share.
When situations like this do arise, we need to keep in mind that sooner or later the roles will be reversed. And that party that they make seem so great on their Snapchat story is definitely not that fun. If they were having that much fun they would be busy doing better things than recording it to show it to the world. You’ll have some of those highlight kind of nights, I promise. You should enjoy them. Revel in them. Post all about it on social media. But next time you’re feeling bad for yourself as you’re wrapped in warm soft blankets in your cozy bed cracking up at a hilarious TV show, don’t feel bad for yourself. Remember that you had your turn at a highlight night not too long ago. Regardless, you’re probably having more fun anyways.
