The Dark Ink

On an ordinary Tuesday morning, you wake up at your usual time.
Your eyes are barely open when your hands search and reach for your phone. Almost instinctively, you open Instagram.
A few reels. A couple hundred stories. Nothing seems interesting.
Until you stumble upon one.

Someone has posted an impossibly aesthetically coded morning routine, down to perfection.
Another is celebrating a financial milestone.
Someone has landed their ‘dream job’ or a promotion, or bought a new house/car.
Then comes The Proposal.
The perfect wedding.
A pregnancy announcement.

One after another, you watch someone else’s life unfold carefully chosen fragments of success.
You are genuinely happy for them. You really are.

But somewhere between the congratulations, the double taps, and mindlessly scrolling through the celebrations, something grows heavier in your heart.
You put your phone down.
You sigh.

Not because you resent their happiness.
But because, for a fleeting moment, you close your eyes and peek into your own life and wonder –
Why is Everyone Ahead of Me?

But mind you, this isn’t a hate trail against social media.
Comparison didn’t begin with Instagram or YouTube.
Long before Instagram, there was the neighbour with a bigger house, the cousin with better marks, the colleague who got promoted before you, the friend who seemed to have figured life and its equations out.

Social media didn’t invent comparison. It simply brought more lives into the room. And we always have looked sideways.

Perhaps we never intended to compare; perhaps it was presented to us through our screens, through travel news.
Someone’s achievement came between your morning coffee and newspaper time.
Some friend’s holiday destination appeared while you’re sitting in 30-minute traffic.
Someone’s new beginning appears in your feed while you contemplate your own life, which seems clueless by the way.

And somewhere in the middle of all of the looking, a question quietly creeps into our minds: When will it be my turn?

Not because you envy them.
Not because you resent their happiness or their achievements.
But because, somewhere inside you, you have been waiting for a moment like that of your own.

Sometimes, we don’t envy the person. We envy the moment.
What it represents. A fresh beginning. Progress.
Proof that life is moving forward.

And there is nothing wrong with wanting your life to change for the better. Wanting a restart, even, or life to just surprise you like that.
The trouble begins when we forget what we are actually looking at.
A fragment of someone’s life.
A perfectly edited photograph.
A thirty-second reel.
A carefully chosen announcement.

We see their visible moments while carrying the weight of our invisible ones.
Does it sound fair?

The question: How much of our dissatisfaction actually belongs to us—and how much was taught to us by watching everyone else live?

Perhaps that is why the comparison sounds so convincing in our heads.
The perfect illusion it creates is unmatched by our unfiltered lives.

We know our unfinished plans.
Our financial worries.
Our disappointments.
The dreams we postponed or even buried.
The opportunities we missed.
The choices we made.

The nights when we lie awake wondering whether we are doing enough with our lives. They don’t know any of that.

Yet we believe and compare the parts of life others choose to show.

We use their visible moments to measure our invisible ones.
And wonder, “We are so behind in life?”

Behind Who?
My question is: Who’s behind who? Who decided the timeline?

Who decided that by a certain age you should have a certain career, a certain income, a certain relationship, a certain home, a certain life?

We rarely pause to question the race we are running.
We simply notice someone running faster and assume we are losing.
Perhaps they are simply running a race that was never meant to be ours.

Your life has never been a race against theirs.
Their chapter was never supposed to become the deadline for yours.

So the next time someone else’s happiness makes you look at your own life a little differently, perhaps you don’t have to feel guilty for it.

Perhaps you can simply ask yourself:

Am I jealous of their life, or am I longing for a moment of my own?

There is a difference.
Maybe nobody is ahead.
Maybe we were never running the same race.

Maybe we have simply been comparing the visible, chosen moments of other people’s lives to our unfiltered, raw, and invisible ones.

And tomorrow morning, the phone will still be there.
The reels will still be there.

The celebrations, the announcements, the beautiful photographs, the carefully chosen fragments of someone else’s life will still find their way onto our screens.

We will still look.
We will still compare sometimes.
Because we are human.

But perhaps, the next time we put the phone down and wonder,

Why is everyone ahead of me?

we might pause long enough to ask:

Ahead of who?

And maybe that question is enough to make us look at our own lives a little differently.

---

If you found a piece of yourself in these words, come back for the stories yet to be told.
A quiet corner of the internet is waiting for you.

Subscribe to Dark Ink.

 — Shruti Surya Bevara,
Still writing,
Still figuring things out;