A few minutes on social media can be enough to remind us of everything we think is missing from our lives. Someone’s career success, someone else’s dedication to fitness, another person’s music… Seeing these things makes us want to improve ourselves. But at some point, that desire can turn into an obligation to keep up with everything. Even when we start something, our minds stay on everything we aren’t doing, making it difficult to appreciate the effort we put in.
Honestly, I struggle with this too. I sing, compose music, and make recordings. Then I want to share them with people right away. At the same time, I need to do well in my classes. Both matter to me. But when I expect immediate results from each, I end up thinking more about what I couldn’t fit into the day than what I actually accomplished.
I think what we overlook is that the people we admire lead different lives. We combine the effort one person puts into their career with the effort another puts into their hobby, then turn them into a single standard of success. Nobody needs to have bad intentions for this pressure to emerge. Someone else may simply be sharing a happy moment while we turn it into another expectation for ourselves.
A study published in 2024 followed 74 adults over five days. Comparing themselves with people they perceived as better off on social media was associated with lower self-esteem in that moment. In the same study, moments of posting were associated with a stronger sense of social connection. These findings do not establish cause and effect, but they suggest that time spent scrolling alone cannot tell us everything about our social media experiences.[1]
So what can we do? I think we first need to distinguish between what we genuinely want and what excites us the moment we see it. It is easy to get carried away by a new interest; wanting to make regular time for it is another matter. Instead of immediately adding every new ambition to our schedules, we can let it sit for a while and see whether it still interests us. Then we need to decide which goal deserves priority at this stage of our lives.
Once we make that choice, willpower is only part of the picture. In high school, I attended an event with students who had achieved top results in the university entrance exam. One student said that having few things to do where he lived besides studying had contributed to his success. That wasn’t an explanation we could apply to everyone, but it made me think about the importance of the conditions we work in.
An experiment published in PNAS Nexus in 2025 also points to the value of changing our surroundings. Blocking internet access on smartphones for two weeks, while leaving calls and text messages available, improved performance on an attention test and participants’ reported well-being. However, only about a quarter of the initial 467 participants met the requirement of keeping the block active for at least ten days. Maintaining a helpful change can itself be difficult.[2]
With that in mind, we can try restricting access to distracting apps while we work. Another suggestion is to decide what we will do and when, rather than simply saying, “I’ll work hard today.” Aiming to finish a particular set of questions for a class, for example, seems more manageable than trying to catch up on everything in a single day.
I am not saying any of this as someone who has figured it all out. I still blame myself sometimes when I don’t do what I planned. But before being hard on ourselves after a setback, I think we should also ask whether our plans were realistic. What didn’t get done, why, and what can we change tomorrow?
We don’t need to give up our many interests. I certainly don’t want to remove music from my life. What we need to learn is how to make room for those interests. Sometimes that will mean sharing a recording later or progressing towards a goal more slowly. What matters is not becoming so occupied with keeping up with someone else’s life that we leave no time for what we want to do with our own.
References
[1] Desjarlais, M. (2024). Subtle momentary effects of social media experiences: An experience sampling study of posting and social comparisons on connectedness and self-esteem. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 29(3), zmae004. https://doi.org/10.1093/jcmc/zmae004
[2] Castelo, N., Kushlev, K., Ward, A. F., Esterman, M., & Reiner, P. B. (2025). Blocking mobile internet on smartphones improves sustained attention, mental health, and subjective well-being. PNAS Nexus, 4(2), pgaf017. https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgaf017
