Here’s why everyone else’s summer looks better online and what’s actually going on in your head.
Summer FOMO has a way of showing up without warning. You open Instagram on a Tuesday evening and suddenly everyone you know is on a boat, at a festival or somewhere that looks effortlessly perfect. Your own week, which was perfectly fine five minutes ago, starts to feel a little flat. That shift happens fast and it happens to almost everyone. There’s actually a lot of science behind why.
Why summer is the peak season for comparison
Social comparison happens year-round, but summer amplifies it in ways that other seasons don’t. Longer days, more social activity and more time scrolling create the conditions for a very specific kind of anxiety: the feeling that you’re somehow doing summer wrong.
Research published in Frontiers in Psychology (2025) found that upward social comparison, measuring yourself against people perceived as having more, doing more or experiencing more, is one of the primary mechanisms linking social media use to lower self-esteem and reduced wellbeing. The more you engage with content that makes you feel behind, the worse you feel about your own situation, even when nothing about your situation has actually changed.
Summer makes this worse because the stakes feel higher. There’s an unspoken cultural expectation that summer needs to be memorable, packed and shareable. When it’s just a normal week, something feels off in a way that a normal week in November doesn’t.
The highlight reel problem
Here’s the part that’s worth understanding: what you’re seeing online is a carefully curated selection of everyone’s best moments. Nobody posts the trip that was kind of disappointing. Nobody shares the weekend they spent mostly on the couch. Nobody documents the summer that looked great on paper and felt a bit empty in practice.
A 2025 study published in Discover Mental Health confirmed that social comparison behaviors on social media amplify negative mental health effects particularly when the content creates an unrealistic benchmark. In summer, that benchmark is almost always unrealistic because it’s assembled from thousands of people’s peak experiences, edited and filtered into a feed that runs continuously.
You’re not comparing your summer to one person’s summer. You’re comparing it to a composite of everyone’s highlights. That’s a standard nobody’s life actually meets, including the people whose feeds look the most enviable.
The gap between experience and perception
One of the more surprising findings in recent research on FOMO is that the feeling doesn’t require an actual gap between your experiences and someone else’s. A 2025 study found that people report feeling FOMO even when they’ve recently had similar experiences to what they’re seeing online. The scroll creates the perception of missing out regardless of what’s actually happening in your life.
This matters because it reframes the problem. Summer FOMO isn’t really about your summer being inadequate. It’s about a cognitive distortion that social media is particularly good at triggering. The feeling is real, but the premise behind it usually isn’t.
What actually makes a summer good
Research on wellbeing and positive experience consistently points away from the kind of packed, Instagram-worthy summer that social media promotes. Studies on hedonic adaptation show that the memorability and emotional impact of experiences tends to come from novelty, social connection and presence, not from how impressive they look in retrospect.
The unplanned afternoon that turned into something unexpectedly good. The low-key day that felt easy and right. The time spent with people you actually wanted to be around. These are the experiences that tend to stick, and they rarely make it to anyone’s feed.
A more useful frame
The antidote to summer FOMO isn’t to go offline or to stop caring about having a good summer. It’s to get clearer about what actually makes your summers feel worthwhile versus what just looks good from the outside.
Those are usually very different things. And once you separate them, the gap between your summer and everyone else’s tends to close considerably, because it was mostly a perception gap to begin with.
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