Why Does Everyone's Life Seem Better Than Mine?

Do you ever ask yourself, “Why does everyone’s life seem better than mine?” I know there were times in my life when I did.

Looking around, you see that everyone you know seems to have their life together. You see your friends snapping pictures of perfect locations and filter-enhanced selfies and posting them on Instagram. You follow your coworkers on Twitter, boasting about the fancy Friday-night restaurant they visited. Even your family members post Facebook updates about new hobbies, trips to exotic locations, and new exciting places they have visited.

If you are not careful, you can succumb to the pressure to have a perfect life. Unfortunately, this will leave you feeling like you are not keeping up with everyone in your social network, and your life will seem lacklustre by comparison.

Why does everyone seem to have the best job, the best house, the best partner, the best kids, and even the best dog?

Here are a few things to remember before you drift too far down the rabbit hole of comparison.

It’s Not All Good, Even for Your Friends

Your friends may post pictures of their exciting new jobs or tell you about the exciting and wonderful things they are doing, but that doesn’t mean they actually enjoy what they’re doing.

Maybe you have a good job but feel stressed out and overworked; the same can go for your friend.

Perhaps you have a good relationship, but mounting credit card debt is eating at your soul.

Maybe you have a great family life but work two jobs and barely sleep.

Everyone has their own set of problems, even the people you envy. However, it can be hard to accept, even if you know this. Seeing other people’s successes and triumphs can stir up uncomfortable feelings and direct your focus to your shortcomings. It can make you feel like you’re the only one coming up short like you’re the only one struggling. But that’s not the truth.

Perhaps You Have Unrealistic Expectations

You might have grown up in a household where things were constantly falling apart and chaotic. Your parents might have been through a terrible divorce, or you might have had a single parent who was barely scraping by each month. That can shape your expectations about how life should go when you’re an adult. You might believe everything should go perfectly for you so you don’t have to relive those painful experiences.

You might also feel that you should be living like the people you see on TV and in the movies or that you deserve to be in a relationship with the person you see on the big screen. As much as you want all of these things to be accurate, they are not real life. You have no control over what your parents were able to provide for you as a child. And you have no control over the person you fall in love with or the timing of that love. Those things just happen, and if we become too attached to unrealistic expectations of what that needs to look and feel like, we can create suffering for ourselves.

You Don’t Have a Support Network in Place

It’s easier to feel like you have everything under control when you have friends and family members around you who you can lean on when times get tough. Having people at your back means you don’t feel as alone when things are difficult. It means you feel less pressure to keep up with everyone else and more pressure to take care of yourself and be there for those you care about.

If you’re struggling with a period of intense challenges, having a support network in place can help you get through those trying times and keep you focused on your goal. You will be less inclined to look at everyone one else as ‘better off’ than you as you feel the support of the community around you.

When you lack that sense of community and feel alone, you will try to make sense of those painful feelings by looking at other people’s lives. You need only look around you and shift to an attitude of gratitude for those around you to put your attention back in the right place.

Generally, You Don’t Feel Good About Yourself.

We all feel bad about ourselves sometimes, but if you’re feeling bad about yourself all the time, that’s a problem that needs to be addressed.

If you’ve got a negative self-loathing voice in your head that won’t shut up, if you feel like a failure no matter what you do, if you feel like you don’t deserve success, if you feel like you’re just not good enough, then you’ve got some healing to do.

Ruminating inside those types of feelings about yourself can affect everything you do and how you do it. If you don’t feel good about yourself, you’re less likely to put yourself out there professionally. You’re less likely to ask for a raise or promotion. You’re less likely to try for a dream job because you don’t think you can get it. You’re less likely to ask someone out because you don’t think you’re worthy of being loved.

This becomes a spiral that is tough to get out of. When you notice that you are in this spiral, it is vital to find the courage and ask for help. Maybe it is with a trusted friend or family member, or maybe you reach out to a Life Coach or Counsellor. Either way, that moment of courage will be the baby step into shifting everything and stepping into some new possibilities.

Conclusion

If you feel left behind by the people around you, it’s critical to take a step back and examine why. This pause will help you put things in perspective. If you look closely, plenty of people are struggling; it is just difficult to admit it.

That’s the rub here; we must accept that we are not seeing the world as it is but only as we perceive it. So, if our perception is formed around what we don’t have and others do, we must start our journey there.

Remember that everyone you see is going through their own journey, faced with challenges. No one lives a perfect life, and even if they appear to be, no one has a perfect life.

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