Lost in Unfiltered Reality

We live in the age of social media. If you’re not on any platform, it feels like you don’t belong to this world—or at least that’s what people think. They say today’s generation belongs to social media. Creating a new account is effortless and free, which makes it seem like an easy decision. But what if this seemingly harmless act is, in fact, one of the most destructive, irreversible mistakes you can make?

It has been seven years since I stopped using Facebook and four years since I left Instagram—except for a brief stint of two to three months during the COVID period. I’ve never been on Twitter (well, until recently, for career purposes) or other mainstream platforms. However, I do use professional networking sites like LinkedIn, and I stay connected on WhatsApp mainly for work and family communication. Ironically, even though my family members have created WhatsApp groups, we still live in the same house and village.

I feel fortunate that I didn’t have to struggle to detach from these platforms because I was never deeply invested in them. But today, I want to talk about something crucial—the power social media holds over our lives. It can be a force of great positivity, but it can also be incredibly destructive. It has the potential to make people feel lost, unfulfilled, and left behind. It can sow seeds of self-doubt and impostor syndrome, all because we constantly compare our lives with others. But how logical is that comparison?

The Illusion of Comparison

We often compare two apples to determine which one is better. But does it make sense to compare an apple with a mango? They are entirely different fruits—grown in different environments, tasting and looking different, they can be liked or disliked. Yet, we ignore this fact when we compare ourselves with others. We take someone’s carefully curated social media highlight reel and measure it against the entirety of our own lives.

Don’t compare a single pixel of someone’s life with your entire image—it’s unfair to you.

Let me explain to you the sentence I just dropped. Unknowingly, we just look into the highlights of someone’s life, we see their Instagram feeds, Facebook posts of vacation, their happy faces, their most happy and grateful moments that people have posted on these social media platforms, and guess what we do, we compare that entirety of our existence, including our struggles, failures, and mundane moments. Obviously, we are going to feel disappointed about our lives, can gives birth to self-doubts. I don’t understand, why people don’t get it that, it’s not a fare comparison.

Imagine plucking a single rose from someone else’s garden and comparing it to your entire garden, with all its variety—obviously, there will be some flowers not as vibrant, some withering, dried, dead leaves, some patches of dry soil. That’s what a natural garden looks like, it has beauty and imperfection coexisting, unless you have an artificial garden — (Well, I intentionally put this sentence which resemblance with most of the people in today's world, being fake or as artificial as they can be). But unless we understand this, we fall into the trap of unrealistic comparisons.

And here’s the irony—many people today are obsessed with crafting a flawless, artificial image. They go to extreme lengths, even modifying their bodies with plastic surgeries and filters, just to appear perfect and gain social validation. But what is perfection if it’s not real?

A Call for Authenticity

The point is simple: we can’t compare a partial, polished version of someone’s life with our entire, unfiltered reality. It will never be a fair game. Social media is not reality—it’s a projection, an illusion. The sooner we realize this, the sooner we can free ourselves from the pressure of unrealistic expectations and embrace the beauty of our own, authentic lives.