When Everyone Else Seems to Be Having a Better Summer

By Kevin Noonan

It’s July, and according to social media, everyone is having a wonderful time.

Someone is drinking something expensive-looking beside an infinity pool. Someone else is at a festival. There are sunsets, weddings, airport departure boards, impossibly blue swimming pools and families who, judging by the photographs at least, have spent seven uninterrupted days enjoying one another’s company.

Meanwhile, you’re standing in the kitchen wondering what to make for dinner. You have work tomorrow, and somebody you went to school with appears to be sailing around the Greek islands.

Summer has always carried a certain weight of expectation, but I wonder if we feel it more now because we have such immediate access to everybody else’s version of it.

We wait for summer. We talk about “making the most of it”. We imagine that when the evenings get longer and the weather improves, life itself will somehow feel lighter.

There will be barbecues and holidays and spontaneous evenings with friends. We’ll get outside more, read more, exercise more, spend more time with the kids and generally be the relaxed, interesting people we apparently weren’t capable of being in February.

And sometimes summer is exactly that. There are beautiful days and holidays we remember for years.

But sometimes it’s just life, with longer evenings.

The bills still arrive. People still have to work. Relationships remain complicated. Children get bored. Holidays cost money. Anxiety doesn’t automatically disappear because you’ve changed your out-of-office reply.

Yet there can be a subtle sense that we ought to be happier because it’s summer.

In therapy, the word “should” is often worth paying attention to. It tends to slip quietly into our thinking without attracting much attention.

I should be enjoying this.

We should be doing more.

I should have plans.

We should go somewhere while the weather is good.

None of these thoughts is particularly alarming. But repeated often enough, they can turn something that was supposed to be enjoyable into another standard against which we measure ourselves.

A Saturday with nothing planned is no longer simply a Saturday with nothing planned. It becomes a wasted Saturday.

A quiet summer becomes a boring summer.

Someone else’s holiday becomes evidence that perhaps we should have organised one too.

This is where social media complicates things.

Most of us understand perfectly well that people present edited versions of their lives online. We know nobody uploads a photograph of the argument about parking before the family day out, or the three hours spent in an airport after a cancelled flight.

Nobody posts the photograph taken five minutes after the beautiful restaurant photograph, when the children are fighting and everyone is exhausted.

We know this.

And yet we compare anyway.

The problem is not that the photographs are false. The sunset really was beautiful. They probably did have a wonderful evening. The smiling family may genuinely have been very happy in that moment.

The problem is that we are comparing a moment from their life with the totality of our own.

We see their best twenty seconds while simultaneously having access to every uncertainty, disappointment and mundane detail of our own day. It is an extraordinarily unfair comparison, but the mind makes it remarkably easily.

Spend long enough scrolling through other people’s summers and a vague conclusion can begin to form: everyone is doing more than me.

Everyone is travelling. Everyone has plans. Everyone has more friends. Everyone is making memories.

I’m wasting my summer.

Of course, “everyone” is doing no such thing.

There are thousands of people sitting on sofas, working late, worrying about money, caring for relatives, feeling lonely, dealing with difficult relationships, waiting for hospital appointments or simply having perfectly ordinary Tuesdays.

They just don’t tend to photograph them.

There is another interesting aspect to this. Sometimes we don’t actually want the thing we feel we are missing.

You might see photographs from a packed music festival and experience a bang of FOMO, despite knowing that three days in a field, sleeping in a tent beside several thousand strangers, is your personal idea of hell.

What we envy may not be the experience itself. We may be responding to what it seems to represent: belonging, excitement, friendship, freedom, a life being fully lived.

That is worth noticing.

Because instead of asking, “What should I be doing this summer?”, it allows us to ask a much more useful question:

“What would actually make this summer good for me?”

Maybe it is a holiday.

Maybe it is getting away for a weekend, going to concerts, seeing friends and filling every available evening.

But maybe it isn’t.

Maybe it’s sitting outside with a coffee when the weather cooperates. Going for a walk at nine in the evening because it is somehow still bright. Having people over without worrying about whether the house is presentable. Reading a book. Going swimming. Taking the children somewhere simple and discovering they enjoyed it more than the expensive thing you spent three weeks organising.

Maybe it is doing absolutely nothing for an afternoon.

These experiences are unlikely to generate much envy online, but that is probably not a useful measure of whether a life is being well lived.

There is a danger, when we become too conscious of how our lives compare with other people’s, that we stop experiencing them from the inside. We begin observing ourselves instead.

Am I doing enough?

Should I be enjoying this more?

Is this a good summer?

It is difficult to be fully present in an experience while simultaneously assessing whether the experience is impressive enough.

So perhaps one useful thing to notice this summer is when “should” starts appearing.

When you think you should have more plans, ask yourself whether you actually want more plans.

When you feel you should be making the most of the weather, consider whether sitting in the garden doing nothing might, in fact, be making the most of it.

When somebody else’s photographs make your own life suddenly seem inadequate, remember that five minutes earlier your life may have seemed perfectly fine.

Nothing about your circumstances changed.

You just looked at somebody else’s.

There is nothing wrong with wanting the big things. Book the holiday. Go to the festival. Take photographs. Make plans. Enjoy all of it.

But an ordinary summer is not a failed one.

Life does not suddenly become a montage because the calendar says July. There will still be work and laundry and worries and rainy afternoons. Hopefully, mixed among them, there will also be good conversations, late evenings, unexpected laughter, rest, connection and moments that feel meaningful precisely because nobody planned them.

You do not have to extract every possible ounce of enjoyment from summer before September arrives.

You do not have to make it look like anyone else’s.

And you don’t need photographic evidence that you made the most of it.

Sometimes a good summer is simply one you were present enough to notice.