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the life you’re missing out on doesn’t exist.

the life you’re missing out on doesn’t exist.

i’ve been thinking about how absurd it is that we can be perfectly content with our lives until we’re reminded of another life we could’ve been living.

you could be having a lovely evening at home, doing absolutely nothing worth mentioning, when suddenly you see a photograph of seven people having dinner somewhere.

and just like that, your perfectly lovely evening becomes a wasted one.

nothing about your circumstances has changed. you’re sitting in the exact same place, doing the exact same thing you were enjoying thirty seconds ago. except now, somewhere in the world, somebody is having fun without you.

and apparently, that’s a problem.

i find it fascinating how easily we can be convinced that we’re missing something. even more fascinating is how rarely we stop to question what that something actually is.

because if you think about it, we’re almost never mourning an experience we know anything about. we’re mourning an assumption.

we assume the dinner was incredible. the conversations were meaningful. everyone was effortlessly funny. nobody checked the time or wished they were somewhere else. everyone went home feeling fulfilled, beautiful, and grateful to be alive.

which is quite an ambitious conclusion to draw from an instagram story.

and i wonder how much of our lives we’ve spent chasing experiences that were never going to feel the way we imagined them.

perhaps the problem isn’t that we’re missing out.

perhaps it’s that we’ve become exceptionally good at imagining everything we’re not experiencing, and increasingly incapable of experiencing what’s right in front of us.

this summer, i watched an interesting phenomenon unfold on the north coast.

people arrived with enormous expectations, many of which had been built entirely around what they’d seen other people experience online. and when their holidays didn’t live up to those expectations, they went home disappointed, calling content creators fake and the north coast itself a scam.

but was it?

or had we collectively started confusing someone else’s experience with a promise of our own?

i went to the same coast, but with absolutely no intention of recreating what i’d seen online.

not because there’s anything wrong with the parties, lavish restaurants, or crowded beaches. i’ve experienced that version of summer for years, and eventually realized it wasn’t particularly enjoyable for me.

so for the past six years, i’ve been having a different summer. a quieter, less overwhelming one. one that probably wouldn’t look nearly as impressive on social media, but makes infinitely more sense to me and the people i spend it with.

and that’s what i find strange about the way we consume other people’s lives.

we’ve somehow started treating their experiences as recommendations, their recommendations as expectations, and our expectations as promises.

then we arrive somewhere, almost as if we’re conducting an investigation into whether the internet told us the truth.

but nobody promised us we’d feel what they felt.

i say this as someone who creates content herself. i don’t think social media is inherently fake, and i certainly don’t think people should stop sharing the things they love.

i actually love seeing how differently people experience the world.

i just refuse to use somebody else’s enjoyment as a measurement of my own.

i can appreciate a beautiful restaurant without wanting to eat there. admire someone’s holiday without booking the same one. understand why a party was incredible for someone else without wondering whether i should’ve been there.

and somewhere along the way, that distinction changed my relationship with missing out entirely.

year after year, the fear became less relevant.

not being invited somewhere stopped feeling like evidence of exclusion. missing a trip i couldn’t afford stopped feeling like falling behind. seeing people enjoy something without me stopped creating this imaginary gap between my life and theirs.

because there will always be somewhere i wasn’t invited, something i couldn’t afford, a place i haven’t visited, and an experience i didn’t have.

there’s no realistic version of life in which i get to do everything.

and why would i want to?

i think we spend so much time trying to make our lives resemble something desirable that we forget to question whether we’d actually enjoy living that way.

the goal was never to have a life that looks good from the outside. it was to have one that feels good from the inside.

and perhaps that’s the actual joy of missing out.

not convincing yourself that everything you’re missing is terrible, or that staying home makes you somehow more enlightened than everyone else.

it’s being able to recognize that something can be wonderful, exciting, beautiful, and completely irrelevant to the life you want to live.

other people’s happiness isn’t an invitation to reconsider your own.

and the life you’re so afraid of missing out on?

it probably wouldn’t have felt the way you imagined it anyway.

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