Everyone seems to be ahead. But ahead of what?
I think one of the strangest pressures of adult life is the feeling that you are constantly running late. Someone your age has bought a house. Someone has started a successful business. Someone is earning twice as much as you. Someone has moved abroad, bought a better car, or reached a position you thought you would have reached by now.
And even when things are going reasonably well in your own life, you sometimes find yourself wondering whether you should have achieved more. I sometimes wonder why we expect everyone to achieve the same things at roughly the same age, when hardly any two people start from the same place.
Some have financial support, while others have responsibilities from a very young age. Some get opportunities early, while others spend years just trying to find their footing. Some are building careers while others are struggling to keep their families financially stable. And we rarely know the full story.
We see someone's promotion but may not know what helped them get there. We see a successful business without knowing how it started. We see someone's lifestyle without knowing what it costs them to maintain it. And sometimes, of course, we see genuine hard work paying off. But somehow, we put all these different stories together and decide that we are falling behind.
Behind whom? And according to whose schedule?
There is nothing wrong with ambition. Wanting a better life for yourself and your family is a good thing. And sometimes seeing others succeed gives us the push we need to work harder. But when comparison becomes the only way you measure your life, even your own achievements stop making you happy. Maybe you are not where you expected to be at this age. Maybe some things have taken longer than you planned. Maybe you have had to deal with responsibilities that others never had to think about.
That does not necessarily mean you have failed or wasted your time. I think we need to learn to appreciate how far we have come without losing the desire to go further. You can be grateful for what you have and still want something better. You can admire someone else's success without treating your own life as a disappointment.
There is no single age by which everyone must have everything figured out.
And perhaps life would feel a little less exhausting if we stopped treating everyone else's milestones as deadlines for our own lives.