Why the grass is greener on the other side (which most people overlook)

Probably everyone has heard the saying that the grass is always greener on the other side. But why should the grass be greener on the other side?

In short, it is not. It is greener where you water it more.

Especially in times when social media is used around the clock and by everyone, one has the feeling that other people always have it better than oneself. The problem is that we only envy the life (or the parts of the life) of the others, which they want to share. After all, it's much easier to stage a life that looks worth living than to actually have one.

By uploading only pictures from vacations or special events, it seems as if the whole life is just a string of beautiful moments. What you don't see, however, is the everyday life of the people. We don't see in their feeds how they struggle out of bed every morning, how they go to work every day with a face like seven days of rainy weather, and we don't see any other everyday problems. So it's a very targeted and selective projection.

For these very reasons, it is easy to fool ourselves into thinking that we would rather have someone else's life.

It is important that we start to see the positive in our own lives. By this I don't mean that we just upload the beautiful moments of our lives on the Internet and then browse our own profile.

What I mean is that it is important to find beauty in the everyday - and not just in expensive and rare moments. For this, it is important that we teach ourselves gratitude, patience and frugality. Marcus Aurelius said one thing that we rather think about what we have than what we lack.

Who is satisfied with little, will find beautiful even in times when you are not doing so well. It is always up to the observer how the day is or was. It is easy to compare ourselves with others and the easier, the less we know the other.

For example, when we see someone drive past us in a Porsche, we quickly think that we would also like to have such a car. What we don't see, however, are the other person's thoughts that they might wish they could drive their car into the nearest tree because they can't stand their life.

I do not want to say that everyone who owns a lot of material goods automatically suffers in some form. Certainly there are also a lot of people who are doing well and who are also satisfied despite wealth. But the assumption that one wants to exchange blindly with them the situation, works to me in such a way, as if one would make it particularly easy for oneself.

Marcus Aurelius once said something clever about this, too: "All we see is perspective. Not the truth."

It is important to arrange your own everyday life in such a way that you are satisfied with it. There are few things worse than knowing you are capable of more, but being too lazy to make something of it. I once heard that there is hardly anything worse than when the person you are meets the person you could have been.

In an interview (I can't remember by whom), it was recommended to imagine every now and then what it would be like to find oneself on one's own deathbed. Surrounded by all versions of the person we could have become - if we had used our potential.

I'm not saying that you should go to extremes every day to shape yourself, but lying on your bed all day and comparing your life with the lives of others on the Internet is certainly not the most fulfilling pastime.

Lao Tzu had a very wise view that trust in oneself is of paramount importance.

And this is exactly what I would like to encourage you to do: practice trusting yourself, train yourself to keep your word to yourself, and also do things that may seem less dazzling - and do all this knowing that you are thus watering your metaphorical grass. Because it is the (previous) lack of care, why the grass appeared greener on the other side.