Someone having a 'perfect life' makes me feel bad

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I don't compare my life to other people's lives very much. I've always had this sense of being glad that I am who I am, and I don't find the idea of changing places with anybody else at all attractive. I never feel all that sure that any other person has a particularly happy life. People put a lot of gloss onto things and I don't think the conventional markers of a "perfect" life tell us much about how a person might really feel. Happiness itself is a strangely elusive thing for most of us. It seems impossible to acquire it directly. In my own experience, if I achieve some goal that I've always wanted to achieve, it feels good for a while but then I get used to it. I've also felt strange episodes of euphoria even when, judging by the state of my life at the time, I shouldn't really have felt that way. I also get little pleasure from achieving something that I was expecting to achieve, which led me to the conclusion that I'm happy when I'm pleasantly surprised, and I don't see any way of engineering such a situation as that for myself. If I go for a goal that I think I probably won't achieve, then it'll feel great (for a while) if I get there, but by definition I probably won't achieve it.

Still, I'm lucky to be one of those people who can get a lot of enjoyment out of very simple things, such as setting up a remote control mains switch to boil a cup of water so that when I wake up I can press a button, get dressed, and walk into the kitchen and get a cup of tea without having to wait. I just like creating trivial inventions like that to make myself comfortable.

I've heard it said that happiness is essentially an unexpected by-product of life that doesn't conveniently come to order. I think there's a lot of truth in that. I think we're all in this paradox where there's no point in making it our life's goal to strive for happiness but at the same time we can't stop ourselves because all higher life forms are "designed" to avoid pain and to seek pleasure, unless you're a monk or something. So I just go by the Zen way which is (roughly speaking) to let it all wash over me and not to worry about it too much.

Beats me but I would suspect that for this person things in life came too easy and too often from a very young age (I believe they won it in their early 20s). When kids came around they couldn't just throw money at them anymore as good parent knows and their "dream" marriage fell apart. It also irritates me to see the 'new job' person literally waste enough money this year to provide my son with his entire post-secondary education. Why on earth can one person get jobs left and right without trying while I have literally applied for hundreds without success?

Getting back to the topic at hand, if you look at my Facebook feed you would think I have the perfect life, with a stable (if low paying) job, beautiful wife and a baby that could easily win a modelling contest but looks can be deceiving as you can tell from my history here at WP. I'm not trying to create a fake life but at the same time I am posting pictures of smiles and laughs from my baby not diaper changes, crying fits and 3am feedings.