Those Perfect Lives are Never as They Seem
Sharing our own bad news fixes faulty perceptions and improves mental health
Last April my husband was fired — unexpectedly and wrongfully — from a job he’d held for more than 20 years. It was, as you can probably imagine, devastating.
For several weeks he shared this news with virtually no one — only a few family members and our closest friends.
Finally, after nearly two months, we shared this pretty major life update more broadly — and the response was overwhelmingly positive. His friends started checking in regularly, inviting him to golf or play tennis. Other people reached out to provide helpful contacts about potential new jobs. But most importantly, several people reached out with their own stories about facing similar circumstances, which they now shared with us for the first time.
In April, we felt scared and very much alone. By June, we felt surrounded by love and support. In many ways, sharing this hard news helped us build closer relationships.
I’ve thought a lot about the highs and lows of last spring over the last year — because so much of what we experienced illustrates a common finding from empirical research in psychology: people regularly share the good, but hide or gloss over the bad. And this tendency has real and substantial consequences for mental well-being.
Appearance is Not Reality
I was invited once to give a talk to a small group of alumni from a particular school. I arrived at the host’s home, and it was lovely inside and out: elegant and comfortable furniture, beautifully manicured landscaping, and a staff of caterers passing out drinks and food on silver trays. The family was equally impressive: a stunning husband and wife and two charming young children. The evening was delightful, and as I got in my car at the end of the event, I thought, What a perfect life this family must have.
And, in all honesty, I compared this perfect life I witnessed to my own much less perfect life: my messy house, my overgrown lawn, my sullen children, and so on. So, really, what I thought was, This family has a perfect life, and my own can never measure up.
The next day, I mentioned attending this event to a friend, who asked me if I knew this family’s history. Of course, I did not. I then learned that this marriage was the husband’s first but the wife’s second. She had married her college boyfriend a few years after graduation and less than a month after their wedding, he died instantly when a plane crashed into his office in the North Tower of the World Trade Center. He never saw their wedding photos.
I learned an important lesson about the faulty logic inherent in making comparisons: we never know the true story about other people’s lives. Our comparisons are based on the external reality they present, or in some cases, choose to present. As economist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz points out, people spend six times as much time washing dishes as they do golfing, yet there are roughly twice as many tweets about golfing as there are about doing the dishes. Similarly, although the budget Las Vegas hotel Circus Circus and the luxury hotel Bellagio have an approximately equal number of rooms, people report checking into the Bellagio hotel on Facebook about three times as often.
They Aren’t as Happy as You Think They Are
And even when these images are impressive, we never know what other people are really experiencing. As playwright Anton Chekhov wrote, “We see those who go to the market to buy food, who eat in the daytime and sleep at night, who prattle away, merry . . . But we neither hear nor see those who suffer, and the terrible things in life are played out behind the scenes.”
There’s strong support for Chekhov’s intuition. In one series of studies, researchers asked college students how frequently they had experienced a variety of negative events, such as receiving a low grade or being rejected by a potential romantic partner, and positive events, such as attending a fun party and going out with friends, in the past two weeks. They were also asked to estimate how often other students had experienced these same events.
Can you predict their findings? For every single negative event, students believed they were experiencing these events more often than were their peers.
For example, although 60% of students had received a bad grade in the past two weeks, they believed that only 44% of their peers had had this experience. On the other hand, students also believed that their peers were experiencing the positive events more frequently than they themselves were. For example, although only 41% of students reported attending a fun party in the last two weeks, they believed that 62% of their peers had had this experience.
Sadly, perceiving such discrepancies — even when they are wrong — is associated with negative consequences. Students who underestimated how often their peers were experiencing negative events and overestimated how often their peers were experiencing positive events reported feeling lonelier and less satisfied with life.
The Power of Sharing Our Failures
So, what can we do ? We can start by sharing not just the good, but the bad — as I eventually did following my husband’s firing.
Many colleges and universities are now trying to counteract the negative consequences of such misperceptions by encouraging people to share their own failures. For example, Smith College started a program called “Failing Well,” in which students and professors share their experiences of personal and professional failure in an attempt to create awareness of the negative events we all face. Similar programs have been adopted at other schools, including Stanford’s Resilience Project, Harvard’s Success-Failure Project, and the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Faces.
Johannes Haushofer, a professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University, created a “CV of Failures” that recounts all the rejections of his academic career. This list includes graduate programs that rejected him, academic positions that turned him down, and scholarships that he did not receive. His motivation for creating this document was his awareness that people’s successes are often obvious, but their failures are not. As Haushofer notes, “Most of what I try fails, but these failures are often invisible, while the successes are visible. I have noticed that this sometimes gives others the impression that most things work out for me . . . This CV of Failures is an attempt to balance the record and give some perspective.”
I’ve written two trade books, including The Positive Shift (from which this piece is adapted), which seems impressive. But here’s the reality: Both books were rejected by numerous agents and publishers and neither has made any bestseller list.
So here’s my biggest takeaway, based on empirical research in psychology: We can all find greater happiness by keeping in mind that what people present to others almost never tells the true story of what they are experiencing. As writer Anne Lamont says, “Try not to compare your insides to other people’s outsides.”
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