It is often said that social media puts pressure on people — particularly young people — to live up to impossible standards. Our digital persona needs to look good and have an amazingly vibrant life, so we show off holidays, exciting experiences, and successes of every kind, while hiding away all the ugly stuff, of which there is quite a bit in everybody's life.

Insecurity

We project a marketable image of ourselves, but this is not because we are all narcissists. In fact, the reason behind this may well be the opposite: we may boast about our successes and hide our failures because we are insecure. It is this insecurity that drives us to try to improve the image we hold of ourselves and our own lives. If we get a positive reaction after posting photos of recent experiences, or describing a felicitous event, this reaction will confirm that what we are showing off is indeed positive and valuable. We are then reassured that our holiday was indeed amazing, our achievement at work admirable, and our dog incredibly cute. This can compensate for our insecurities to a certain extent and will temporarily help us forget some of the less attractive aspects of our lives.

The problem, of course, is that everybody else is doing the same thing, so we are all constantly increasing each other's insecurities in a perfectly vicious circle.

Social norms discourage sharing negative feelings

A significant factor behind the positive bias in how we portray ourselves is that it is simply impolite to talk about unpleasant subjects in most social situations, so most encounters have to be artificially cheerful. We may complain that others only ever talk about their successes and glories, but the reality is that we sometimes may not want to be distressed or bored by tales of other people's miseries when we are just having a casual drink with them. Doing so tends to be perceived as maladroit and even embarrassing.

Remember too that many people have a limited number of significant friendships with whom they would feel at ease sharing difficult or sad information.

The mechanisms above distort the way in which we perceive the lives of others, so we may end up believing that they all enjoy a nice and simple existence, which is full of successes and fun aplenty. The unfortunate byproduct of this distorted view is that it can lead to the belief that we are the only ones struggling in a relationship, or anxious about whether we'll be able to make rent this month, or worrying about a medical test result, or suffering with challenging psychological symptoms. Obviously, that's not the case. Life is difficult for all of us and always contains in every case a significant amount of darkness and pain, hardly ever shown on social media.

So the next time you see or hear somebody bragging about their lives, be compassionate. They may just be showing their insecurities.