Your Life is Not a Movie

No one needs a reality check more than my generation. All Gen Z does is scroll through social media looking for an escape: stalking celebrities, hyper-fixating on a random girl we found on Pinterest, or even placing ourselves into the lives of others—concrete or fictional. Those of us who think we avoid such a trope are just as spellbound, choosing instead content and entertainment we think others will laugh at or enjoy, throwing a bone to our selected community to keep them busy while we meticulously select our next move. If you’re still thinking, “I don’t do that, I don’t care what people think of me,” you’re probably lying ... but on the slight chance that you really don’t care, and your social media presence simply happens to follow your innate identity, maybe it’s time to think about how you feel about yourself and your own life.

If you’ve been on any social media apps in the past few months, you’ve probably noticed the sweeping “my life is a movie” mindset. Everywhere you look another creator is giving you advice on how and why you should start romanticizing your life. Everyone seems to think that the way to solve your problems is by making a playlist for every occasion or pretending a camera is watching you cook pasta alone. Don’t get me wrong, I’m guilty of catching myself doing things to make my life more interesting, but once you really think about why you depend on this romanticization, it’s not so fun anymore.

Needing this mindset to carry out simple, daily tasks—like cooking—should get under our skin. It should make us wonder why we can’t bear to live our lives as ourselves and what’s keeping us from enjoying life and all its mundane activities. Being surrounded by people telling us how horrible the world is now, and how we’ll never experience the joy of the “good ole days” gives us every reason to want to turn off reality and join one where we feel welcome. Adults tell us how easy we have it while we worry about how old we’ll be when the world finally ends, hear about the latest of our peers who lived through another shooting, or try to keep up with politics that make it seem like everything will just get worse as we go along. It’s just easier to go on a color-coordinated picnic with a five-dollar cherry coke and tell ourselves that our lives are just like the movies.

Romanticizing our lives helps to put a colorful film over the morbid world we live in; although this is hiding from our reality, at least at the moment we have control over something. Control is addicting, and soon enough it becomes impossible to live without using these dissociative techniques. I used to constantly imagine myself in a different body or as a part of a different plot. I told myself that I was “creating my own narrative” when in reality I was creating a fictional character. I loved my fake life so much that I felt the normal life I was living wasn’t enough; I felt like I was living wrong. Looking back on this cycle I was trapped in, I realize that the lives I made up for myself were utterly unrealistic.

People glamorize the act of romanticizing your life to get through your day, and I can imagine some of you have had similar experiences to me: feeling ashamed and not up to par with the life you curated for yourself. You paint this perfect picture of your life and the world in your mind and try to convince yourself that this is how everything really feels; when in reality, depressing images and emotions replace the ones you’ve written in. Being the “main character” is fun. Here, the world revolves around you, the biggest problems for everyone are the ones involving yourself, all of humanity working to push you to the climax of your plot. Spotify tells you what to listen to if your life were a movie and reminds you that “every main character needs a soundtrack” (duh). We watch shitty coming-of-age movies that make the lives we live look magical, making us delusional and forgetful of all the work that went into creating these fictional projects. But in reality, no matter how many pages you scribble in your journal so hard it rips (aesthetically) or how many used bookstores you take pictures in waiting for your Netflix original Meet Cute, the world DOESN’T revolve around you. No one cares about your life or your problems because everyone has their own boring lives and problems to deal with, and probably imagines everyone else cares about them.

I used to feel that thinking like this was depressing and pessimistic, but now I think it’s liberating. Not only does it free you from the expectations everyone else holds but also from the unprecedentedly high expectations you set for yourself. You live in your own bubble for so long that when it’s finally popped and you see everything else around you clearly, it’s easy to see that it’s never been that deep. It’s time to de-romanticize life and see it for what it really is.

There are some deliberate, and easy, measures you can take to ensure that you stay grounded in reality. I’ve tried taking walks, not allowing myself to create a completely imaginary life while doing so, and journaling an exact summary of my day instead of melodramatic love letters; all of these actions have helped me to remember the joys of real life. Doing things every day that force you to see the charm in the blandness of reality makes it possible for you to simply enjoy every day. Such a simple statement would’ve seemed impossible before I implemented these daily “reality checks” but now I don’t need to watch from the outside in.

Romanticizing the boring details of life can be fun, but quickly becomes an inescapable cycle used to cope with reality. When the line blurs between reality and “on-screen” narratives it can be hard to want to enjoy what is in front of you. It’s much easier to stay away from anything you don’t like than be uncomfortable in the realities of the ups and downs of life, but forcing yourself to love even the downs makes life less of a waiting game. Instead of waiting for another short-lived high, you can be perfectly content at rock bottom, in your own, REAL body and mind.

Your MagazineMay 9, 2023