The Theater of Comparison#
I’m a season ticket holder to a theater I never bought admission for. Sitting in the dark. Watching endless performances of other people’s seemingly perfect lives.
Each social media scroll is another act. Everyone else stars in their own romantic comedy. I’m an extra in my own drama.
The stage: carefully curated scenes. Perfect breakfast in golden hour light. Exotic vacation with impossibly blue water. Promotion announcements written with humble-brag precision. Relationship milestones captured with professional-quality “candid” shots. I watch from the audience, applauding with likes while cataloging how my life fails to measure up.
Cruelest part? I know it’s all performance. Intellectually, I know. That breakfast took twenty minutes to arrange and twelve attempts to photograph. The exotic vacation charged to credit cards. The smiling couple fought in the hotel room five minutes after the shot.
But knowing doesn’t help. The whisper still comes: “Why can’t your life look like that?”
This theater has taught me a new form of mathematics where my reality is always divided by someone else’s highlight reel, creating equations that never balance in my favor.
- Their career success minus my career uncertainty → My inadequacy.
- Their relationship bliss divided by my singleness → My unworthiness.
- Their apparent contentment multiplied by my struggles → Proof that I am failing at the basic task of being human.
I’ve become fluent in this math. Constantly measuring my behind-the-scenes against everyone’s edited highlights. Automatic calculation. Constant comparison.
But what if this whole theater is built on a misunderstanding?
Social media isn’t documentary. It’s marketing. Everyone selling their success story. Not just to others - to themselves. We’re all performer and audience simultaneously. Desperately trying to convince everyone (and ourselves) that we’ve figured it out.
The secret? There is no secret. No perfect life hiding behind the right filter, right job, right relationship, right mindset. Just real humans doing their best with complicated, messy, beautiful, difficult reality.
I began to curate my own feeds like a gallery curator: unfollowing accounts that left me feeling inadequate and seeking out voices that spoke honestly about the full spectrum of human experience. I started following people who shared their failures alongside their successes, their struggles alongside their triumphs, their ordinary Tuesday afternoons alongside their highlight-reel moments.
More importantly, I began to examine my own performances. What was I trying to prove with my posts? What image was I trying to maintain? What parts of my real life was I editing out to maintain the fiction that I, too, had it all figured out?
I try to be more discerning. But the performance is everywhere. The habit runs deep. Even recognizing curated highlights doesn’t stop the emotional impact. Rational knowledge doesn’t protect against feeling inadequate.
The theater continues. I’m a reluctant participant - performer and audience in an exhausting show nobody can stop attending. Trapped in mutual deception. Pretending to be happier and more successful while feeling inadequate compared to everyone else’s pretense.
Sometimes I see the absurdity. Most of the time I’m just another actor. Desperately trying to convince everyone I’ve figured it out. Secretly wondering why everyone else performs better.
My ordinary, unfiltered reality isn’t a curation failure. It’s truth. But truth doesn’t compete well with edited fiction. The theater continues. I’m both victim and perpetrator. Locked in exhausting performance of having it all figured out.