Life isn’t the highlight reel or the blooper reel. It’s the full uncut version, boring parts included.

Both edited versions are distortions, just in opposite directions. The polished one omits the waiting and the admin, the disaster one omits every ordinary afternoon that went fine, and neither resembles the actual footage, which is mostly neutral and uneventful. Judging yourself against either one guarantees a wrong answer.

When you catch yourself narrating your life as either a triumph or a mess, add the boring parts back in. The commute, the reasonable Tuesday, the unremarkable evening. Most of a life happens in that register, and it is not a failure of the life to be made mostly of it.