#NoFilter: Getting over social media envy

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 multilayers 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.

Stuck in traffic in the armpits of Manila, I scroll through a virtual laundry list of all the things I didn’t get to do, and places that are yet cutouts stuck on my desk. I see someone getting accepted into the MBA school of their dreams and, like a familiar poison, I taste in the back of my mouth again the bitterness of “what am I doing with my life, omigod, I am never going anywhere, literally and figuratively.”

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. These people have built for themselves an impressive reputation on the strength of their academic achievements, viciously cool lifestyle, and a seemingly limitless pool of resources steadily propelling them to the top of the food chain. 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”; in this case, one appears to be sitting on a dung heap while all around stretches an emerald blanket of better living on which your other friends are grazing. 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. What you have and don’t have will always be in reference to what others do or don’t, and one’s personal achievements are given appropriate weight and acclaim based on peer evaluation. 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; you were shuffled off to the side and given a runner-up ribbon. There was only one “first honors” awarded every year, and it went to the kid who was smarter, more mentally agile, and more fiercely determined than all the others. The psychological trauma of my childhood, stage-mom fighting, and a suspicious case of food poisoning aside, 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: where, in order to garner first or second honors, you had to hurdle certain QPI/GPA requirements based purely on individual merit and an impartial institutional grading system. What a strangely terrifying and liberating time that was, where my only true competition was myself. 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. Instead of being plunged into self-belittling or bitter envy whenever someone uploads or updates a profound achievement like a promotion or a great new job, it might be worth asking some questions, like: How can I achieve the same success? Or: What is it about them or what have they done differently that I can learn from?

By rechanneling your passion from envy to constructive, forward-thinking action, you orient yourself to recognizing opportunities instead of setbacks. Envious of your friend’s sunset Eiffel Tower shots? Save a little bit every day toward your future European trip and research more on travel fairs and budget accommodations. Jealous that your cousin just landed herself a spot in an Ivy League school? Read up on MBAs, study for your GMATs, and you might surprise yourself. The best people I know indulge in moments of self-pity, but almost always follow up with: What can I learn from this, and how can I become better?

Life isn’t always going to be fair. There will be someone prettier, cooler, or smarter than you, and the faster you accept this, the faster you can move on with your life, and focus on the things that really matter. It’s also worth noting that there will always be more than meets the eye in people’s online lives. The very nature of social networking sites breeds a community that simultaneously shares too much and yet reveals little.

How often have we observed in others, or even in ourselves, the act of reducing people to the content of their social media activities? We’re always going to post about the great things that happen to us, big and small, that elevate our own online status and perpetuate the image of a successful, happy life.

Now the question is: Are you going to focus on your friends’ milestones, or on yours?

Maxine Maia R. Ang, 24, is product manager of Maybelline New York, Philippines, and, she says, “a self-taught selfie guru.”