Why Does Everyone Else Seem to Have It All Together?

There’s a specific moment, around 11:47 p.m., when you’re holding your phone and see that your friend from high school renovated her kitchen.

Not just any kitchen. A kitchen with an island, recessed lighting, and clear jars labeled “flour” in stylish handwriting.

You look up, glance around, and see an empty jam jar on your counter that currently holds screws and a five-shekel coin. And you reach one clear, scientific conclusion:

Everyone has it together. Except me.

Except that’s not a conclusion. It’s an optical illusion.

The Myth That Everyone Else Has It Together

First, let’s agree on the facts.

This list exists for everyone. Check off yours:

✓ Everyone gets up at 6:00 a.m. and does yoga. You know exactly one woman like that. She never stops talking about it, which is why it seems like everyone does it.

✓ Everyone has folded laundry. No. There’s a chair. The chair. You know which chair.

✓ Everyone knows where they’re going in life. The vast majority are improvising with impressive confidence.

✓ Everyone knows how to cook. Half the country makes schnitzel and hopes nobody asks questions.

✓ Everyone is financially organized. Nobody posts Stories from the bank.

The only real difference between the women who seem to have everything under control and you is that they don’t photograph the other parts.

Within three minutes of scrolling, you compare yourself to the most beautiful kitchen in Israel, the most beautiful vacation in Europe, and the most well-behaved child in Greater Tel Aviv. Three completely different women, whom you are now measuring yourself against all at once, as though they were one person.

No such woman exists. She never did.

You’re losing a competition to a composite creature you put together yourself.

There’s another distortion here: everyone thinks everyone else is okay, so everyone hides the fact that they aren’t always okay either. You’re not the only one. You’re simply the only one who knows the whole truth about yourself.

What Was Meant for Her Was Never Taken From You

In the Gemara, in tractate Yoma (38b), Chazal say: “A person does not touch what is prepared for another, even by a hair’s breadth.”

These words were said about making a living, but they also offer a powerful lens through which to view life. Not everything someone else has was meant to be yours.

What was intended for your friend was intended for her. It was not taken from you. It was not offered to you first. It was never yours.

And what is intended for you will not be given to anyone else, no matter how beautiful her kitchen is.

Chazal instituted a special blessing for someone who sees a large gathering of people, Baruch Chacham HaRazim, and explained in Berachot (58a): “Just as their faces are not alike, so too their minds are not alike.”

The difference between people, the Jewish sages explained, is not only in their faces. It is in everything else, too. Each person has her own path, her own strengths, and her own circumstances.

Some people have endless patience with children and zero patience for forms. Some know how to host 50 people without breaking a sweat but haven’t been able to find their ID card for a week. And some have homes that look like a catalog, but while they were organizing them, they didn’t speak to anyone.

If no two women are identical, then no two paths are identical, no two roles are identical, and no two tests are identical.

And in an exam where every student receives a different questionnaire, it’s impossible to know who is in first place.

You’re Only Seeing the Angle

For a moment, zoom out from the picture of the kitchen.

A little to the left, there’s a pile. There’s always a pile.

A little to the right, there’s a chair. The chair.

And above the stylish jars, there’s a cabinet that, if you open it, will have at least one thing fall out.

You just don’t see it because the camera is pointed somewhere else.

And that’s the whole difference.

Not the kitchen.

The angle.