Most people follow hundreds of accounts on social media. Imagine if each of them posted just one fantastic moment every other month. That’s only six posts per year, per person.
One friend is standing on a beach in the Maldives. Another is picking up a new car. Someone is celebrating a promotion; someone else has transformed their body. There is a wedding, a new house, a candlelit restaurant, a summer festival, a mountain sunrise.
No single person is fabricating their life. They are simply sharing one genuine highlight from an otherwise completely ordinary month.
But you do not experience these highlights in their proper context. You experience all of those exceptional moments together as a continuous, endless stream. Somewhere along the way, the exceptional begins to look normal.
What Is a Successful Life?
If we take a moment to strip life back to its foundations, what quickly becomes glaringly obvious is this: a safe home, enough food and clean water, combined with reasonable health, a content family, and a few genuinely close friends is what winning looks like. Add in enough financial cushion that six months without work would not financially ruin you, and you have achieved success.
Not the beginning of success. Success itself. Pure and simple.
Yet increasingly, this doesn’t feel like enough because the basics are not particularly impressive to look at.
A secure home looks exactly like the humble house you left this morning. A good marriage is mostly just two people doing ordinary things together—evenings spent in front of the TV or quiet moments with the people closest to them. Close friendships are forged from repeated, unglamorous conversations in familiar places. Financial security simply means a quiet, untouched number sitting in an account. Most importantly, health is often noticed most only when it disappears.
The things that make life secure are frequently quiet.
Because they are quiet, we stretch for louder things: a better car, a bigger house, a more exotic holiday, or the latest phone. When those no longer hit the spot, we focus on the better body, perhaps a cosmetic procedure, or designer clothes to wear to a fancy restaurant.
There is absolutely nothing inherently wrong with any of these desires. The issue lies in the distinction between the basics and the luxury. The basics are success; the stretch is the display of success.
And somewhere along the way, we developed a growing need to display it—to prove to other people that we are doing well. Ironically, those are the very people who are not paying much attention to us, because they are too busy trying to prove the exact same thing in return.
This Did Not Begin With Social Media
Media companies have been shaping what people aspire to for generations.
Diamond advertising is one famous example. De Beers’ 20th-century campaigns helped strengthen the idea of the diamond engagement ring as a cultural symbol of love and commitment. Marketing did not invent the diamond ring, but it helped make one particular version of affection feel normal and expected.
Print magazines mastered this long before the digital feed arrived. A travel magazine never showed the delayed flight, the disappointing hotel room, or the afternoon it poured with rain. It showed the beach at sunset. A fashion magazine never chose an average photograph of an ordinary person in everyday clothes. Everything was painstakingly selected, styled, edited, and curated.
But back then, there was an important boundary: we understood what we were looking at. We knew a travel magazine was supposed to showcase beautiful places in their best light. The curation was visible, and eventually, the magazine ended with the turn of the final page.
The feed, on the other hand, has no ending. It also has no clear boundary between the ordinary and the exceptional.
A childhood friend’s post appears directly beside a global celebrity. A silly dancing trend appears beside a billionaire in a supercar. A fitness coach appears beside someone you went to school with who is now staying in a luxury hotel in Dubai, followed immediately by a cousin’s family barbecue. Politics, tragedy, comedy, beauty, holidays, relationships, and breakfast all arrive through the exact same window.
This is an extraordinary human achievement. It has placed much of the world in the palm of our hands. The question is not whether this technology is inherently good or bad; the question is what happens when we look through this highly efficient window for years on end.
The Horizon Expanded
Consider an 18-year-old who has carried the world in his pocket since he was twelve. For six years, he has watched people travel, buy cars, build impressive bodies, and display wealth. He has watched people become famous, fall in love, party, and live in beautiful homes.
Intellectually, he knows these things are not happening to everyone, every day. But understanding a distortion and being unaffected by it are two very different things.
Now, tell him to work forty hours a week for an entry-level wage.
The traditional promise was that sacrificing nights out, keeping an old phone, and saving diligently would lead somewhere tangible: homeownership, independence, a stake in society. Something to build and protect.
Today, that calculation can feel broken. When the cost of a house feels out of reach for a young worker, the sacrifice changes shape. It takes immense discipline to say no to immediate experiences just to wait for a distant reward that may never arrive.
When the summit appears impossible to reach, the question stops being: What must I sacrifice to get there?
It becomes: Why should I sacrifice at all?
For a growing number of people, why bother? is becoming a genuine option. They choose to stay home and spend their money now—on travel, the phone, nights out, and clothes. It is easy for older generations to dismiss this as laziness or a lack of discipline, but that may miss something important. People are more willing to climb mountains when they believe the summit can be reached.
The Things That Take Time
There is another consequence to having so many options permanently on tap. The feed continually shows us that there are more people to meet, more careers to pursue, more places to go, and more versions of ourselves we could become.
That can be liberating. But homes, families, friendships, and communities are not built from endless options. They are built from repetition. The same people. The same places. The same commitments. Again and again.
A close friendship becomes deep because you keep turning up, including for the boring, ordinary moments. A community becomes strong because people stay long enough to know one another. A family grows strong through thousands of ordinary afternoons that would mean very little in isolation.
These things are slow, repetitive, and almost impossible to display. And perhaps that is part of the problem. The window to the world continually shows us what else is available, tempting us to trade our critical foundations for new aspirations.
Yet many of the things we aspire to only hold real value once the foundations are secure. The expensive holiday means more when you don’t have to put it on credit. Success means more when there are old friends to share it with. A beautiful house means more when it actually feels like a home.
The Wrong Direction
This is not an argument against ambition. It is completely okay to want more out of life. Build the business, buy the car, travel the world, and improve your health. Seeing what is possible through social platforms can be a great addition to life. It can teach us, connect us, and inspire us.
The problem begins when we consume so much of the exceptional that it redefines our baseline of what is normal.
It happens when the display of success becomes easier to recognise than success itself. When a safe home feels ordinary or unimportant. When old friends feel less interesting than new possibilities. When a perfectly good life begins to feel like failure simply because it doesn’t look impressive on a screen.
We are not wrong to want an extraordinary life. But we may have started looking for it in the wrong order.
The luxuries were never supposed to come before the foundations; they were supposed to sit on top of them. While looking through the window to the world, we should be careful not to sacrifice the quiet things that make a good life possible just to chase the louder things we think a good life should look like.
Perhaps we haven’t forgotten how to live a successful life.
Perhaps we have just forgotten how to look away from the window long enough to recognise the one we already have.