What process do you go through when posting a photo? A couple weeks ago, I posted a photo on Instagram. It took me a half hour. First, I had to select this picture from 16 nearly identical images on my phone. Then, I had to try out every possible filter Instagram offers to edit the picture in the most natural way possible, deciding if a filtered image is better than the original (almost always, a yes). Finally, I had to come up with the proper caption with or without emojis and decide upon a good location for the tag. I am actually amazed this only took thirty minutes.

Why do I go through all of this effort? Why do any of us go through the effort? All of our posts will appear on people's feeds to be compared to one another's. We will each scroll through and see beautiful, happy people living seemingly perfect lives. Many of us will question whether or not our own photos live up to theirs. For me, it is a constant analysis of whether or not the image I am conveying is the person I want to be perceived as. I have noticed many friends doing the same as they plan out the timing of their posts, pull in numerous filtering apps, consult no less than three friends, and then stalk the number of likes and comments to determine whether or not the post was successful. Sometimes I realize people are planning so much for their posts, that I wonder if they are really enjoying the moments they are living to portray.

The problem here is not with Instagram itself. In fact, I love sharing my happiest photos with my followers and viewing theirs in turn. It is incredible that people are now able to create digital collections of their life snapshots to share with the world. And, since making my account, I have known that these moments and lives we show are not our full lives. Looking at somebody's Instragram would be like watching television and viewing only the highlights from a soccer game. While these are important and enjoyable moments, they are not the whole game. We typically do not see the bad days, the unbearably late nights studying, the times of grief, even the small disappointments such as spilling an iced tea. On Instagram, or any social media we choose, we see these happy, beautiful lives. Correction, we see happy, beautiful, filtered lives.

There is a certain danger in comparing our full lives to other's highlights. We forget that these people experience the negative moments and the self-criticism as well. Regardless of how long I have known this, I still catch myself caught up in the filtered world. I have found that a lot of us do, whether we realize it or not. We spend so much time comparing and entering this unexpected form of a competition sometimes with others and sometimes with the ideas we have created for ourselves. We cannot live our lives as though they are our Instagrams. Real life isn't filtered and that's okay.