One Monday, my cousin was sipping coffee against the foliage of New York Central Park done up in autumn glory. A friend, on the other hand, got engaged to her high school sweetheart and took to Facebook in what appeared to be a personal bid to crash the social networking site with uploading pictures. I scroll, I click “like”, I dispense admiration and envy in equal parts. Someone getting promoted, someone having a baby, someone who just launched his own business… Social networking sites are full of someones whose lives inevitably appear to be multi-layers of filters better than yours.
It is a near-crippling handicap – being afflicted with social media envy. Beyond consuming so much time thumbing through other people’s online lives, comparing them against yours (and consequently judging your own woefully lacking), it begets a learned helplessness that easily ferments into resignation.
How easy it is to surrender to the inevitable mediocrity of one’s life, and embrace instead with firsthand regret the safety of the ordinary. Our society is slowly but surely being taken over by millennial overachievers, anyway: a segment of the population that has come to maturity amid securing employment in a competitive job market and enjoying the spotlight as superstars of the work-life balance. And all of them seem to be our friends on Facebook.
It’s an aggravated case of “the grass is greener on the other side.” They have cooler vacations, better-paying jobs, more well-behaved children, and 50-shades-of-sweet boyfriends, splashed across your feed.
The result? A self-sustaining community of green-eyed netizens with a bad case of the Fomo (fear of missing out). It’s harmless enough when you’re sighing over someone else’s promotion at work, but when that kind of behavior degenerates into snarky sour grapes, it’s time to put an end to the cycle of social media envy.
Comparing yourself to others is a natural human progression. But from deciding by virtue of comparison, for example, that your scholastic achievements are noteworthy when judged against your peers’ academic achievements, it’s a slippery slope to being focused solely on beating others just to come up on top.
But since when did beating others count as winning?
At the root of social media envy is the belief that only by trumping other people can one be considered a success. I myself was reared on a strict childhood diet of beating…others. All the way up to high school, we were judged not on the basis of our scholastic grades alone, but how we stacked up versus the other kids. It didn’t matter if you got a 97 in the math test if another kid got a 98. The psychological trauma of my childhood, I and most of my friends were raised to believe that it was not enough to be good; others had to be stomped to the ground.
It was only when I entered college that a less polarizing grading system was made known to me. Stripped of external foes, I had myself and my own intellectual barriers to beat, where the real hurdles to accomplishments were how fast I could learn and how well I could adapt to challenges.
To be sure, comparing yourself to others as a barometer for your own success is a healthy thing. But when at the root of your mentality is the principle that the only measure of your self-worth is others’ successes or failure, you’re in for crushing disappointment. While being happy, bitter, respectful, or envious of other people is subject to your own individual conditioning, it’s what you choose to do about it that makes all the difference.
Others’ accomplishments should be catalysts for change rather than triggers for self-pity. Now the question is: Are you going to focus on your friends’ milestones, or on yours?
Maxine Maia R. Ang, 24, is a product manager of Maybelline New York, Philippines, and, she says, “a self-taught selfie guru.”
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