American actor Gabriel Basso deleted all of his social media after seeing the top of Mount Everest. Not with his own eyes, but through someone else’s video posted online. From his perspective, he didn’t deserve that view. He hadn’t trained for it, suffered for it, or climbed for it. Watching it from his phone felt like receiving a reward he had never earned.
Basso’s reaction may sound extreme, but it captures a quiet truth about life in the digital age: we are constantly experiencing the world secondhand.
Every day, we witness people reaching their own “Everest.” We watch strangers travel to places we’ve never been, secure their dream jobs, transform their bodies, fall in love, buy homes, and achieve milestones that often take years of effort. Social media compresses all of that struggle and uncertainty into a few seconds of polished footage. We see the peak, but not the climb.
This creates a strange paradox. We have more access to extraordinary experiences than any generation before us, yet many people still feel dissatisfied with their own lives. Part of the reason is that exposure is not the same as achievement. Seeing something does not create the same meaning as working toward it.
The journey is what gives experiences their weight. Training for months to run a marathon makes crossing the finish line emotional. Saving for years makes buying a home feel transformative. Climbing a literal mountain makes the view unforgettable because it carries with it the memory of exhaustion, fear, and perseverance. When that journey is removed, the experience becomes something closer to entertainment than fulfillment.
Social media blurs this distinction. It allows us to feel as though we have lived countless lives and accomplishments without participating in them. We travel through curated posts and watch life unfold in highlight reels. Over time, this can quietly reshape our sense of what we’ve actually done versus what we’ve merely seen.
Social media was originally designed to bring people closer together. Its early promise was connection, the ability to stay in touch across distance, share life updates instantly, and build communities that might not have existed otherwise. Over time, however, that sense of connection has started to feel more complicated. Instead of simply helping us relate to one another, these platforms often place us in a constant state of observation and comparison. We scroll past curated versions of people’s lives more than we actually engage with them, and in doing so, we can begin to feel strangely detached not only from others, but from our own reality. What was meant to bridge distance can sometimes create a different kind of separation, one where we are surrounded by other people’s lives, yet feel alone in our own.
Another theme that plays into this media narrative is the romanticization of everyday life. Social media has a way of turning ordinary jobs, routines, and even relationships into something that looks effortless and ideal. A morning makeup routine becomes an aesthetic ritual. A busy workday becomes a polished “day in my life.” Even stressful careers are often framed through carefully edited moments that highlight excitement while hiding exhaustion and burnout. From the outside, these snapshots can make entire lifestyles feel not only perfect but also strangely out of reach.
The same happens with relationships. When someone posts photos of a seemingly perfect partner or a flawless anniversary celebration, viewers see only the highlight, not the reality. They don’t see the arguments or even the possibility that the relationship may come to an end. Over time, this selective visibility can distort expectations, making real life feel messier and less satisfying by comparison.
When we constantly encounter others at their peaks, it becomes easy to measure our own progress against their finished moments. We rarely see the long stretches of uncertainty that came before someone’s success. Instead, we see a steady stream of peaks, which can make our own ongoing climbs feel slow and ordinary.
But the truth is that everyone’s Everest is different. For one person, it might be finishing college. For another, it could be overcoming illness, supporting a family, or simply finding stability in a chaotic world. These personal summits often don’t look dramatic online, yet they require just as much endurance and effort.
The man who deleted his social media wasn’t rejecting technology itself. He was reacting to the uncomfortable feeling that he had witnessed something deeply meaningful without participating in the struggle that made it meaningful. In his mind, the view from the top belonged to the climber who had earned it.
His choice raises an important question for all of us: are we living our own lives, or are we mostly watching others live theirs?
It’s important to reflect on how we use social media and ask whether it’s actually serving us, or if it’s allowing more negativity and dissatisfaction to seep into our lives. The goal isn’t to reject technology entirely, but to be mindful of when watching others begins to replace actively living and pursuing the things that matter to us.
Access to other people’s experiences is not inherently harmful. It can inspire, educate, and connect us. The problem arises when observation begins to replace action, when we mistake consuming someone else’s journey for progressing in our own.
Real fulfillment still comes from climbing, not scrolling. It comes from intense effort and the slow, frustrating process of working toward something that matters personally, not publicly.
We may never stand on the world’s tallest mountain. But each of us has our own Everest to reach. And unlike the ones we see on our screens, those views will feel different because they were earned authentically with patience and hard work.
Sometimes the clearest way to recognize that difference might be as simple as stepping back, deleting an app for a while, or setting a time limit, to see just how much these platforms shape our lives without us even noticing.