Monday morning, your alarm goes off late. You get up, rush to get ready, grab a quick coffee, and head to class, a pretty typical college morning. Somewhere between walking across the drillfield and checking your notifications, you scroll past a “perfect day in my life” video: a 6 a.m. workout, journaling, a matcha latte, glowing skin, and a color-coded planner. Suddenly, your very real day, the rushed breakfast, the assignments, the mental exhaustion, feels like it’s falling short of some invisible standard. Most days in college don’t look like an aesthetic montage. Yet, after scrolling through endless “perfect day” routines online, it’s easy to feel like your own day isn’t productive enough, exciting enough, or put-together enough. Social media has made it seem like every day should be a 10 — perfectly balanced, perfectly aesthetic, and perfectly fulfilling — when real life, especially as a busy college student, simply doesn’t work that way.
Social media and the rise of “influencers” has completely changed the game. Practically overnight, expectations of what your day should look like, how you spend your time, or even what skin care routine you use became the highlight of what you see online. Spending countless hours online, watching people you don’t even know, show you their days. Perfect workouts, perfect diet, perfect friends, perfect everything. Isn’t it enough? Doomscrolling turns into guilt. “Why am I not eating healthy enough”, “I should be getting up early to workout”, “ I need to be more productive with my schoolwork”. As the saying goes, comparison is the thief of joy, and that is no different to comparing your day to a stranger online.
Social media was created to be fake and give false expectations while hiding realities. As humans, we are not meant to be exposed to every person’s day.
What we see online is merely a highlight. A 30-second “day in my life” rarely shows the skipped meals, the stress before an exam, the messy room just outside the frame, or the moments of burnout between the aesthetic clips. Social media is toxic and addicting, as the algorithms reward what is visually appealing and easily digestible to the audience, not what is actually honest or ordinary. Naturally, the content that gets pushed to the top is the most polished version of someone’s life, not the most accurate one.
For the majority of college students, this distortion of life can be especially heavy. For the majority of students at Virginia Tech, life is full of early classes, late-night study sessions in Newman, rushed meals between commitments you forgot about, and the constant balancing act of academics, social life, and mental health. Trying too hard to look impressive to those around you and make everyone feel like you are handling things better than them. There is nothing aesthetic about sprinting across campus in the cold or staying up late to finish an assignment. Yet when your feed is filled with curated routines and “that girl” productivity videos, even a normal, hardworking day can start to feel inadequate.
The pressure to make every day a 10 is exhausting. It suggests that if you’re not waking up early, exercising, eating perfectly, studying for hours, socializing, and still feeling energized, you’re somehow doing college wrong. Try not to make yourself feel too bad, real life operates in fluctuations. Some days you’re motivated and on top of everything. Other days you’re tired and overwhelmed. Both are normal. Both are human.
Ironically enough the more we consume content about perfect routines, the more disconnected we can feel from our own lives. Instead of being present, we start mentally ranking our day against someone else’s edited version. We stop appreciating the small wins, like showing up to class, finishing a reading, making it through a stressful week, all because they don’t look impressive on a screen.
College is not meant to be aesthetically enhanced. It is meant to be lived. Not every day will be exciting. Not every day will be productive. Not every day will feel fulfilling or aesthetic or worth documenting. And that’s okay. Life is not a montage; it’s a series of ordinary moments. .
A day where you went to class, ate when you could, laughed with a friend, and got some work done is not a bad day. It is a real one. And in a culture that constantly tells us to improve and be perfect every hour, there is some peace in accepting that some days are just a 5, a 6, or even a 3.
Because the truth is, not every day has to be a 10 to still be a life worth living.