Look for the garbage cans

How to know if you're seeing the whole picture

Back in late 2021, my family listed our former home for sale — an experience which taught me that real estate photos are only loosely in the category of “non-fiction.”

We hid all traces of personal existence from the house before the photographer snapped the photos. We took the knife block off the kitchen counter, the shampoo out of the shower, and even moved the trash cans out of the bathroom and laundry room and my home office.

If you look through Zillow listings you’ll see that this is common practice. No trash cans anywhere! Apparently in our dream home fantasies we have no need to throw away our dental floss or dryer lint.

Escapes from reality

Real estate sites aren’t the only places where the staged image can be different from real life. Social media photos and posts, holiday letters, class notes in your alumni newsletter — all these are contexts where people routinely construct an image of their lives where the real and metaphorical garbage cans have been put somewhere else.

There’s nothing wrong with this. No one really wants to see a trash can or a pile of laundry. Nor do they want to hear, in the holiday card, about the scream-fest last Tuesday when everyone was late getting out the door. You do not need to report in the class notes that you and your spouse are arguing daily about how to parent your teen.

The problem comes when we compare someone else’s edited image with our own messy reality. Of course we feel like our lives can’t compare with the fantasy of someone else’s life in all its waste basket-less glory.

This isn’t the whole picture

But instead of getting discouraged, remind yourself to look for the garbage cans. If you’re looking at a picture of someone’s home office, and there doesn’t appear to be anywhere you can throw away a piece of paper, then you can recognize that this is probably not the normal state of affairs. Everyone needs to throw things away. Even people who live in houses that look like they belong in a magazine produce some sort of garbage. Indeed, in the throes of dinner or a big project, their kitchen or home office probably looks a lot like yours.

If you don’t see the garbage can, you can rest assured that there is one — it’s just hidden out of your view. You aren’t being shown the full picture. So don’t compare your life to that fiction. You’ll just wind up unhappy, or hiding your own trash can, and then where are you going to throw away your dirty tissues?