Why do women always try to show a perfect house, perfect yard, a perfect husband and family, perfect kids? You get the idea. Women are fixated at the idea of showing that their lives are perfect. They will go to any lengths to hide the glaring imperfections in their life and to only show the carefully edited, perfect world with pained, but smoothened, happy smiles. Why do we do this? Let’s do a pros vs cons list of this to analyze if showing or pretending that we have perfect lives is a good idea or not.

Before I am taken apart for aiming this at the ladies, men do it too. However, men do a lot of strange things and I am less involved and interested in their reasoning. I don’t have the energy to figure them out.

Pro 1: We make our friends jealous! Oh yeah. That bully who always tried to put me down. Well, here’s my perfect life right back at you! Let me rub that in your face. Take that, miss. Look at my perfect husband, y’all. And my beautiful car, my picture perfect vacations. Ah, that felt nice. Revenge is sweet, isn’t it?

Except for one tiny thing. That bully is still living in your head. She still has power over you that makes you lie about your life. Wouldn’t it be much better to shake her off?

“Hey”, you say. It’s not just for the bully. I am showing off to all my friends.

If we are talking about friends, or in other words, people we like, Guess what?! Basic human nature 101 dictates that you will actually never show off to people you like, if they are inferior to you. You would be compassionate and try to downplay your fortunes to make your unfortunate friend feel better. In other words, you are only showing off to people you consider are more fortunate than you. You may be jealous of them, and are competing with them to create an illusion of your life that is not true. So if we do need to create this illusion, are our so called friends actually our friends? Or, are we being nice to our less fortunate friends?

Pro 2: We make our neighbors or any random stranger who happens to see us either in the real world or on social media jealous. Why would we want to do that? Why put in all this effort and live a lie to make unknown people jealous? All we achieved from our hard work is to make other people feel bad about their life and existence. And to do this, we had to spend time, energy and resources. What can possibly be good about such a situation.?

Allow me to list the cons.

Con 1: It is not real. Everyone’s life is very challenging. We are only wasting our time and energy showing a perfect life. We know it is not true. Such a lie will drain you and make you feel empty. The praises are meaningless, you know it. Now, we don’t have to share our misfortunes with anyone and everyone, but we can choose to be silent, rather than sharing a lie. It’s also exhausting to keep up with a lie.

Con 2: It is a waste of our resources. We could spend that time doing something useful. We can learn a new skill, pursue our hobbies, read a book, watch a movie. Learning a new skill or pursuing a hobby might actually lead to a better life thereby making your artificially perfect world actually achievable.

Con 3: Such showing off is bad for the larger society, the world, our planet. We might be wasting money buying useless stuff to show off our shiny homes. We might be buying brand names, or indulging in travel, or other wasteful practices. This is bad for the environment. There is no positive, and plenty of actual, tangible negative in this scenario.

Con 4: You open yourself to being exploited and conned by advertisers. They target this exact urge to show off to push you to buy a new this or that, thereby further deteriorating our environment. This means, you are playing with the future of your kids by indulging in such practices.

Con 5: You are pushing other women to do similar things. Women are already overworked. They are already expected to show perfect behavior. Do not be a part of this toxic culture. Let women be themselves, pursue their interests and make a place for themselves in the world. Do not derail others by your show of perfection that others will then pursue. This chain reaction is bad for everyone, and especially for women.

For the good of humanity, and especially for your sisters, stop pretending that you are perfect and have a perfect life. It is ultimately the imperfections that spice our lives up. A mediocre, perfect life is boring and uninspired. To aspire for it is a death sentence to your personal growth and aspirations. Let us be ourselves, show ourselves as we are (or keep it private), and strive to be better people, rather than show ourselves as an artificial, fake person.