Two Ingredients, One Messy Lesson

This week, I have to confess to doing something I’ve never done before. It’s a little embarrassing to admit this so publicly to so many people… but… well… we’re all friends here, right?

Here it goes… and please don’t judge me…

I made a recipe I saw on TikTok.

I know. I know. I’m a grown man with a job, two children, and a professional skepticism about everything I see on the internet. But somehow I got convinced to make a dessert by a shirtless stranger with the abs of a Renaissance sculpture.

The recipe was for something called two-ingredient watermelon sorbet… basically just a watermelon and some lime juice. It looked delicious and seemed healthy, so the next time I was at the store, I grabbed a watermelon and a handful of limes.

In the video, the glistening adonis sliced the watermelon open in roughly two seconds. Then he scooped out the flesh, laid the chunks in a tidy single layer across a wire baking rack, and slid them into the freezer.

A second later he pulled out a shelf of perfect little ruby ice cubes, tipped them into his food processor — the same food processor I own, which felt like fate — and pressed the button. Within seconds, the machine whirred its way toward a lush, uniform, softly whipped pink cream. He squeezed in some lime juice, gave it one more satisfying pulse, then scooped the contents into a hollowed-out watermelon rind. The result looked like the kind of soft-serve spiral you’d expect from someone who’d been working at Dairy Queen for twenty years.

Naturally, at the end of the video, he scooped a spoonful into his mouth, closed his eyes, and told me: Mmmmmmm… delicious.

After sitting on my counter for so long I began to worry it had gone bad. I finally cut into the watermelon a couple nights ago, mostly out of guilt over the eight dollars I’d spent.

My first hint the process wasn’t going to go very well began as soon as I started scooping the insides. Before I’d even scraped out half the flesh, watermelon juice was dribbling off the edge of the counter and onto the floor.

Even freezing the watermelon wasn’t easy. In the video, the guy had spread his watermelon out in an aesthetically pleasing single layer on a wire rack, but I challenge you to find a suburban house with two young kids that has room for a flat rack of watermelon in its freezer. Instead, I crammed the chunks into a Ziplock bag, wedged it into a corner between a package of peas and a box of chicken nuggets, and spent the next 15 minutes scrubbing my counters and mopping my floors.

A couple nights later, excited for sorbet, I removed my watermelon from the freezer only to discover it had frozen into a single solid brick. As a result, in order to fit pieces into the food processor, I had to physically chisel them apart. Then I pressed the button and got… essentially nothing. The blades chopped the bottom layer, but everything above stayed frozen.

Basically, the next 15 minutes turned into a repeated cycle of stabbing the frozen chunks of watermelon with a spatula to break them apart, shoving them down, pulsing, and repeating. But slowly, and after again flooding my counter and floor with watermelon juice, it finally began emulsifying into the pinkish-red cream I’d seen. Sure, by the time I was done, there were still some solid red chunks. But it was close enough.

I squeezed in a little lime juice, gave it a final mix, and tasted it.

It was actually delicious. Certainly not the best dessert I’ve ever had, but it tasted like a decent watermelon sorbet and, with only two ingredients, I presume it was genuinely healthy. I certainly ate a lot of it, so I hope it was healthy. Regardless, technically, the recipe worked, which means the effort was a success, right?

So why am I sitting here telling you about all this while feeling like a huge failure?

The entire time I was hacking at that watermelon brick or mopping my floor, I kept thinking about the guy in the video, and how effortless he’d made it look. Why did I think any of it was real?

I literally make social media videos for a living. I know, with absolutel professional certainty, exactly how that watermelon video got made. I know his watermelon was just as hard to cut, his food processor was just as ineffective as mine, and he made the same mess. He probably even swore the same swear words.

I also know his flawless final swirl took a dozen attempts to get right, and that holding up a half-watermelon full of sorbet for the camera is a heavy, awkward, arm-trembling challenge. And yet, none of that knowledge is protecting me at all. I completely understand the illusion, but I still feel like a failure for not being able to match it. So what’s going on here?

The issue is the editing. He hid the mess — the twenty minutes of stabbing an ice brick with a spatula — and focused only on the success. And even though, intellectually, I know that’s what happened, by not seeing it, the part of me that’s insecure and self-conscious still has room to believe he didn’t actually have to deal with the hard stuff.

And I bring this up because I’m pretty sure the same thing happens with a lot more than TikTok recipes. We see colleagues who make their jobs look easy, or parents who seem to be raising quiet, respectful angels instead of teenagers, or the classmate who never appears to study but aces every test.

We all know none of that’s real. But because their struggles are edited away from our view, we’re left with just enough doubt in our minds to imagine we’re doing something wrong.

Unfortunately, I’m not sure there’s actually a solution for any of this. Heck, I’m literally a “scholar of social media”... I professionally study the stuff, and I still feel like a failure while watching other people edit away their struggles.

So maybe the goal isn’t to stop feeling like a failure when you compare yourself to other people. At the very least, if I can’t manage to do it, I’m not going to pretend you should. Instead, maybe the goal is to simply keep reminding ourselves that everything we see is edited. And even though it’s going to make us feel like insecure, self-conscious failures, that feeling is measuring the mess rather than the result.

After all, my sorbet may have been a time-consuming mess to make. But it was still delicious. Which means the sorbet wasn’t the failure. The failure was believing I could do it without soaking my counter in watermelon juice.

Since this issue is about the struggles that get edited out of what we see from other people’s lives, here’s a helpful skill to get better at recognizing those edits.

Instead of taking the polished versions we always see at face value, I want you to spend some time deliberately reconstructing the messes that had to exist for various things happening around you.

For example, the next time someone shows off a new outfit, you might spend a few moments imagining all the driving, and going in and out of stores, and trying stuff on that was required for it. Maybe even with a bored tween walking behind you constantly saying, “Can we go home yet?” (Yes, that’s coming from a voice of experience…)

Here are some questions you might ask:

• What would this have actually required someone to do, make, or obtain in order to accomplish it? Walk through the real steps, including the boring, hard, and unglamorous ones.

• Where are the cuts? What part of the process would be the most tedious or embarrassing, and therefore the first thing anyone would edit out of a story about it?

• How many attempts am I not seeing? The single, shareable result you’re seeing usually sits on top of a pile of failed ones you’ll never watch.

• If I had told my own version of this story, what would I have edited out, and would my final version seem just as effortless as theirs?

• Am I comparing my whole process to their whole process, or to the two seconds of it they chose to show me?

Getting good at this type of analysis is going to help you switch from seeing effortless people everywhere to seeing edited people. And while that won’t stop you from comparing yourself (and feeling bad), it’ll at least help you learn to separate processes and outcomes.