It鈥檚 easy to feel bad about your own life after spending some time looking at people鈥檚 social media, especially Instagram.

Some people鈥檚 lives look absolutely perfect on social media. Some will be ostentatious - posting photos of their cars, homes, first-class flights or luxurious vacations, while others prefer to focus on their physical fitness progress or post photos of their food (I鈥檓 guilty of the latter; the eggs benedict from Alternative Grounds is often on my Facebook).

Of course social media isn鈥檛 all bad. After all, it鈥檚 an incredible tool that has revolutionized our lives and the way we communicate. It allows us to connect with like-minded people from all over the globe, stay informed about events worldwide, and perhaps most importantly, to keep up to date on our friends鈥� lives, especially the ones who live far away.

But a lot of times it feels that people are simply trying too hard, trying to convince everyone else - and perhaps even themselves - that their life is better than it might actually be.

This makes me wonder why we try so hard to convince others that we are happy and successful.

I鈥檓 certain that this has not always been the case. I remember that, when I was little, whenever my grandparents and their generation were asked how they were doing, their answer would always be something along the lines of 鈥淚鈥檓 alive鈥� - always emphasizing that life wasn鈥檛 too easy for them, or suggesting that things could be improved.

And now we have Instagram, and God forbid we portray ourselves as anything other than perfect.

When I first signed up for Instagram, I was overwhelmed by how hard people were trying to impress others. But since I was still curious to see what my friends were up to, I decided to keep it.

So I chose to see it from a different perspective. I figured that maybe social media is simply people trying to showcase the best part of their lives - maybe that鈥檚 something that we all aim for, something that makes us feel better about ourselves.

Maybe there鈥檚 too much hurt and sorrow in the world already, and social media is simply a escape - a place where everyone鈥檚 lives, including our own, look better.

But it鈥檚 hard to swim against the current, and so I usually find myself taking 37 different selfies before I choose one that鈥檚 good enough for Instagram (then I delete it after 30 minutes if it doesn鈥檛 get any likes).

I wonder if at some point we鈥檙e all going to realize that we鈥檙e simply trying too hard, and social media won鈥檛 look as it does today.

Or maybe we鈥檒l just wake up to the fact that social media often does not reflect how happy people really are, and we鈥檒l stop trying to impress each other.

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