The Sunset That Wasn't Effortless

There’s something strange about living in an online world. Some days it feels like everyone else is floating through a perfect fairytale — the soft-lit bedrooms, the flawless morning routines, the sunsets that look like they were painted directly onto the sky by some celestial artist.

And then there’s us.

Real people.

Trying to make sense of our not-so-aesthetic days.

I used to look at pictures like the one above—skies drenched in warm oranges and soft pinks, brick buildings glowing like they were part of some old, enchanted campus—and I’d wonder why my life doesn't look like that naturally.

I’d ask myself:

Why doesn’t everything in life fall into place so effortlessly?

But here’s the thing:

This photo?

I took it.

And let me tell you, it was not effortless.

I stood there taking shot after shot, experimenting with angles, shifting my position because the lighting kept changing, adjusting my phone because it kept overexposing the sky. I looked like I was conducting a scientific experiment with the clouds.

And after all of that—after the tries and retries—this was the one photo I liked.

One.

Out of several.

To you, it might look magical.

To me, it was persistence disguised as beauty.

That’s the truth most of the Internet leaves out: the effort, the frustration, the almost-gave-up moments. The perfect picture never shows the imperfections that shaped it.

So the next time you scroll through someone’s impossibly curated story, pause.

Don’t compare your entire reality to a frame they chose out of 50.

Don’t assume their life looks like that all the time.

It doesn’t.

None of ours do.

Life isn’t a fairytale, and it doesn’t need to be.

It’s messy, unpredictable, beautiful in ways that never make it to our feeds.

It’s a journey—not a perfectly filtered ending.

And maybe that’s the most comforting part.