The Myth of Other People’s Lives
As we grow older, there is one aspect of life about which we remain surprisingly uninformed: how our inner lives compare with the lives we imagine everyone else is living.
Our frustrations, disappointments, regrets, and grief become heavier because we tend to imagine that we carry more of them than most people do. We quietly assume that everyone else has somehow figured life out while we alone are still stumbling through it. We suffer not only because life is difficult, but because we mistakenly believe our difficulties are unusual.
In the middle of the night, the mind becomes a terrible statistician. We convince ourselves that no one could have made as many bone-headed decisions as we have, that few families have endured as much misunderstanding or conflict, that no sensible person could have mishandled money quite so spectacularly, or found themselves wondering if they have somehow fallen behind everyone else.
My electric utility company sends me a monthly neighbor comparison report. It compares my home’s energy use with that of “efficient neighbors” living nearby. In theory, it’s a helpful feature. In practice, my household almost always comes up short. Then I wave politely to the people across the street as they roll their recycling bins to the curb, secretly convinced they are judging both my carbon footprint and my character. Their imagined smugness is almost comical.
It has made me wonder what other comparison reports I wish existed.
What if, once a month, we received a confidential report showing how our lives compared with those of our neighbors—not their carefully edited public lives, but their real ones? We might discover that our doubts, our disappointments, our strained relationships, our financial worries, our lingering grief, and our unanswered questions fall almost exactly within the expected range of ordinary human experience.
We spend so much of our lives longing to be “normal,” by which we usually mean happier, more successful, more financially secure, more emotionally together. Yet perhaps normality is not the absence of sorrow but its quiet companionship. Perhaps what is most ordinary is not confidence but uncertainty, not perfection but regret, not certainty but the daily work of beginning again.
Our lives are wonderfully beautiful and undeniably messy. We need not add to our burdens by imagining that our struggles are unique. Behind nearly every front door—and certainly behind every Facebook profile—is a story of hidden courage, private heartbreak, and unfinished healing.
The sadder truths of our neighbors surround us on every side, though we rarely speak of them.
In the end, perhaps the most ordinary thing about us is not our success, but our shared longing to be seen, understood, and loved despite the beautiful mess of our lives.
