Never compare your insides to someone else’s outsides.

Have you noticed how fabulous some people’s lives look? You check Facebook, Instagram, etc to see what friends are up to and their lives look amazing! Boating, grilling out with friends, playing with their beautiful children, and still finding time to whip up some amazing meals and creating beautiful crafts. How can you ever compare?

  
The answer, of course, is that you can’t. Without thinking, we only use social media, those tools of public projection, to show the highlights of our lives. The bad pictures, mistakes and boring sections are edited out. At a glance, it would appear that everyone’s life is perfect and amazing from these curated displays.

  
You might think that of my wife and I, if you are following along on our journey around the U.S. in our motorhome. It is an amazing adventure and we are having a wonderful time and know that we’re blessed to have the opportunity, but we still have boring, frustrating, and bad moments, that you won’t find captured on our Facebook stream.

  
Even looking at our journal entries, you only see the highlights. Yes, we have visited 5 states and seen a lot of neat things. But here are a few of the things that we don’t mention:

• hours and hours and hours of driving
• so many bugs that we don’t go outside except to leave and go somewhere else
• the challenge and frustration of finding somewhere to park for the night
• getting annoyed and tired as a day goes on too long
• gas station stops and watching the meter spin as the fuel pump flows
• the challenges of having a good time while budgeting
• the pictures that don’t turn out so well

   
   
Life is pretty darn good. We really don’t have anything to complain about. But if you looked at it only through the filter of social media you might think that we do nothing more than relax between adventures.

  
Whenever you look at someone else’s life, whether in person or online, keep in mind that it has been curated only to show the best parts, the highlights. Everyone has lows to offset the highs, stretches of boredom punctuated by excitement, and adventures tucked in between the day-to-day routines.