You wake up and scroll through photographs of people more beautiful than you.
You envy their bodies, their boyfriends, even their acai bowls and cappuccinos that look too picturesque to possibly taste any good.
You see them vacationing in the Caribbean and wonder, how do they drink piña coladas and still have washboard abs? It doesn't make any sense.
But it does make sense. The "newsfeed people" are perfect.
How could you not compare yourself to them? They have it all: looks, love, fulfilling jobs (which usually consist of travel and occasional food/fashion blogging).
Some of them literally do nothing for a living and get paid for being popular. They are everything you want to be and so, so much more.
Maybe if you watch them closely enough, and study their habits, you too can become a newsfeed person.
You too can accumulate millions of followers who celebrate the little things you do. You too can amass your own marketing army that watches over you, day and night, building up your like-count and consequently reinforcing your sense of self-worth.
But before you commit your life to becoming a social media celebrity, take a step back and ask yourself, isn't it possible that the newsfeed people are doing exactly what you're doing, comparing themselves to the other newsfeed people?
Think about it. Kendall Jenner has 35.6 million followers on Instagram. She must be feeling pretty good about that. After all, there are only about 318 million people living in the United States. Assuming that her fan base is mostly in the States, she's got a solid 10 percent of the population following her. That's crazy.
But Kim Kardashian is on an entirely different level. With 45.7 million followers, she makes her stepsister look like a young Steven Glansberg.
But wait, don't crown Kim queen of the gram quite yet. Taylor Swift, with 300,000 more followers than Kim, is clearly the new girl at school.
CNN even ran an article last week with the headline, Move over Kim Kardashian: Taylor Swift now Instagram's most popular user.
That's what's so fucking crazy about this world we're living in. Nobody is popular enough or rich enough or beautiful enough, if they're comparing themselves to everyone else.
No matter how freakishly gorgeous you are, there's guaranteed to be someone out there posting selfies with more swag.
So next time you find yourself scrolling through Instagram, resenting the newsfeed people for their apparent perfection, remember that they're people too.
That means A) they're not nearly as perfect as you think. You're just confined to a reality in which they present nothing but their best selves and B) they have insecurities too, insecurities that arise when they compare themselves to the other newsfeed people who seem to have it all figured out.
The key is, we all need to stop comparing ourselves to each other. The world is full of quality people, there's no denying that. But rather than obsessing over the qualities that we don't have, why not focus on the ones that we do?