***Cover Photo from DeMIlked.com***

Your life doesn’t have to look good on Instagram.

We live in an age of transparency, relying on social reception for validation. But we share our persona, not our person. And the judges of our experience are bored people on toilets.

The best way to understand your world is to look within.

This requires stillness, as constant motion makes understanding difficult. This requires quiet, as external voices drown out our own. And this requires patience, because an often-ignored voice stops speaking. The crowd's praise crowds the space. We need to find our words again.

I’m writing this in my office. Microsoft word is on my screen. My baby monitor is on the desk. In the corner of the room lies a sleeping dog.

This is the exact morning I want to be having. But no filter can make a word document sexy. This isn't good content and it doesn’t look good on Instagram. And it doesn’t have to.

The task of life is to find your game and play it. If you’re lucky, you might even win. For those who have found this clarity, public perception holds little value.

The “still small voice” is the compass; social validation merely distracts.

Every moment on a screen involves someone selling something. Your friends sell their persona in the court of public opinion. Advertisers sell products during your favorite show. I am selling you on this idea right now.

But what’s sold more than anything…is…selling.

And we’ve bought it.

We have never felt so compelled to show people how good our lives are. But praise from our peers is a poor substitute for personal satisfaction. It’s the wrong scoreboard.

I have a client who dropped tons of money trying to fit into the elite country club at the center of his real estate market. He wanted to play the game, shake hands, and hobnob with the right people to grow his business. He hated it.

He expressed guilt for this misuse of resources, to which I suggested that the money spent trying to join the Joneses was an investment in learning you did not want to be a Jones.

That is a high-value, easy to overlook education. We have the same opportunity with social media. I don’t think “likes” are what we’re after. I think what we want is a life no one likes because we are so busy living it we forgot to share.

Two thousand years ago, Seneca said:

"Very often the things that cost nothing cost us the most heavily."

Your life doesn’t have to look good on Instagram. That costs too much.