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today.
Hello everybody and welcome back to the psychology of your 20s.
The podcast where we talk through some of the big life changes and transitions of our
20s and what they mean for our psychology.
Hello everybody, welcome back to the show, welcome back to the podcast.
New listeners, old listeners, where we are in the world.
It is so great to have you here.
Back for another episode as we of course break down the psychology of our 20s.
Okay, have you ever had that feeling, that sensation, that panic, that everybody is further
ahead in their lives than you are?
They are more successful, they are more sure of themselves.
They are further along when it comes to their relationships, their finances, knowing what
they want to do with their lives.
This feeling of being behind is a really common one during this decade, during our 20s.
It is the norm, not the exception, but I think despite that it's also incredibly stressful
and at times debilitating when we, A, don't have open conversations about it.
It isn't an acknowledgement of how many of us are feeling stuck in our lives.
And B, we constantly compare ourselves to the people who do have it all, feeling like
everyone else is finding this whole life thing very easy whilst we're struggling.
So I want to talk about it today, I want to talk about why it is that we find ourselves
in this constant spiral, this constant self-doubt kind of cycle, no matter how much we do
have, how much we have achieved.
And I think despite knowing that life is a journey, not a race, we still feel behind.
But I think the real question is, like behind what, what is this invisible standard that
we are all falling short of?
What exactly are we comparing ourselves to and why does the success of other people and
the accomplishments of other people sit so heavy on our minds and diminish our own sense
of agency and our own progress?
Well, that's really like the core of this discussion.
This is such a common phenomena feeling behind in your 20s.
And it's kind of ironic because if it is so common, how come we all experience it?
Who are these people who are not feeling behind?
Why is it that they are seen as what is normal?
Why is it the people who are ticking everything off their bucket list, achieving all the necessary
milestones, why are they the standard?
I also want to share some of your experiences, the listeners, a lot of you have kindly written
in to me on Instagram and said that you feel similar and have kind of articulated why
you're struggling.
We have stories of being 30 and single, never having been in a relationship, another person
who started their career again in their late 20s, people struggling with debt and decision
making and job choices and not feeling like you can see a way forward.
And of course, we're going to discuss why we feel that way, the psychology behind it
and what we can do about it, how we can kind of just, you know, to be frank, stop feeling
so shit about our own lives and our own progress.
How can we stop viewing our 20s as a race or a competition to get to this like imaginary
finish line and just enjoy the personal journey, enjoy the scenic route, enjoy what we want
to get out of this decade.
So there is obviously a lot to discuss alongside your very generous and vulnerable personal
anecdotes.
And my hope is that if you get one thing out of this episode today, it is that absolutely
everybody is feeling behind or feeling lost or feeling stuck in some capacity.
Even the people that you look to and compare yourself to who seem so much further ahead
than us, they genuinely are feeling this as well because I think that it isn't about
what you do have.
It isn't about what you have achieved.
It's about our mindset and our mindset towards competition towards success towards uncertainty.
So we have a lot to discuss.
I'm going to stop rambling without further ado.
Let's get into feeling behind in our 20s.
We have a lot of opportunities to feel behind in our 20s because we have a lot of opportunities
not just for social comparison but also for self doubt.
I think for the first two decades of our lives for the first 18 years, all of us are very
much in step with each other.
You know, we're kind of all existing on an identical path.
Everybody who is our own age is doing the same things.
We're going to school.
We're trying to hit the same milestones of graduating.
We're at the same classes.
We have the same life problems.
We are all working towards a common goal.
Everything feels very much in line.
There is limited opportunities for comparison when it comes to life progress.
You might be comparing yourself based on like, look, who's had their first kiss or silly
things like that.
But in terms of where you're at in your life and the progress that you're making towards
your goals, if you even have any when you're that young, that is all kind of very, very similar.
And then we enter our 20s and suddenly it all splinters.
Our life paths become very, very different, very unique.
And that only is exacerbated the further along we get into our 20s and into this decade.
We're kind of no longer bustling alongside each other through mandatory schooling.
We suddenly have freedom to choose and choose differently.
And there are a lot of nuances in this, one person wants to take a gap year, one person
continues to work.
Their high school job or their uni job to save up another person speeds through their
four year degree in three years and is doing their masters by 23.
Somebody is going straight into a high paying job after college.
Somebody is having children.
It's like everybody is suddenly living in a different timeline compared to the common
timeline that we used to have.
And I think that it's at that point when everything splinters that it feels like a race suddenly
begins.
You know, it feels like we didn't realize we're at the starting line.
We didn't realize that suddenly it was going to be a competition, but implicitly it feels
that way.
It's kind of like the race to become real adults.
And then in many ways, I think speaking to my friends, it feels like it's this race to
enter our 30s or even like our mid 30s with a partner, with a successful and fulfilling
career, with a really cushy savings account, with a bunch of friends and also with enough
fun experiences to kind of prove that although we got here, we still enjoyed ourselves and
enjoyed our lives along the way.
And we've become a lot more aware of the people who are doing those things and the people
who are not, which might be us, the people who are falling short.
I think the core reason we feel behind is obviously social comparison.
Without the visibility of others and their life paths, we wouldn't have any reason to think
that what we're doing is wrong.
We wouldn't have anybody to be behind because we would only be thinking about ourselves.
We would only be conscious of our own progress and what felt good for us.
But of course, we know that comparison is a very like human disease.
It's not even a disease, a human syndrome, a human trait.
And sometimes it's just not possible to not have that kind of going on in the back of
your mind as such a social tribal species.
What's really fascinating to me, if not ironic, is when I asked all of you people, my beautiful
listeners, whether you feel behind as someone in your 20s, 80% of you out of almost 5,000
votes, probably more because I checked that only after it had been up for like, I don't
know, 14 hours.
But 80% of you at 5,000 votes, so with significant samples, I was there, said, yes, you are feeling
behind.
There is something in your life that you're not satisfied with that you feel you should
be further ahead or further along in regards to.
That's compared to 20% of you who I assume feel really comfortable with where you're at.
Maybe you're secure, you're working on yourself, setting your own pace.
You could also just be doing exceptionally well, which congratulations.
But what I find fascinating about this is that feeling lost, feeling stuck, feeling
unaccomplished, feeling behind is the norm.
It is not only the norm, it is the majority.
It is the huge majority, 80%.
And I just think that it comes down to a lot of reasons, but because this generation
is so much more competitive, but also yet again available for comparison, right?
Particularly through social media and LinkedIn and publicly available information, it's
very easy to focus on everybody who has more than you and not the people who are just like
you.
The people who are doing really, really well for themselves, that 20%, maybe even that
10%, that 5%, they stand out and so our attention immediately goes to them compared to the people
who are doing life just like us in the same lane.
That's not an interesting story.
That's not going to capture our attention because we already know that narrative.
We already know what that life looks like compared to the life of somebody that we want.
We also can't ignore this implicit blueprint that society sets for our life, that even
if we don't believe in, we are still influenced by.
So when we think about like society's blueprint for us, there is kind of this unspoken timeline
of events.
You graduate, maybe you go on and get your degree or some qualification, you find your dream
career, you get your job in that field, you make enough money to live independently, you
find the love of your life, you get promoted, you buy a house, you get married, you have
children, retirement, death.
That's it, that's what the blueprint tells us.
And it's a very restrictive idea of what constitutes a happy life.
And it's also a very incomplete narrative and incomplete blueprint because it doesn't
include the stories of people who completely uproot their lives at 30 or 50, the people
who never get married or who never have kids, the people who take a few years off between
graduation and full-time work to explore, the people who never find their dream job, the
people who, you know, these kind of milestones just aren't going to happen in the same way
for them.
There are those stories, the ones that I've just kind of given a few examples of, they're
not the ones we hear about and so we don't think of them or include them in our own interpretation
of how our lives should be going, how our lives should be progressing.
When it comes to feeling behind, I believe that there are three major areas where we experience
this the most.
That is our careers, our relationships and our finances.
Not only are these three of the most formative elements of our 20s, the things that I think
we spend a lot of time worrying about, but in some ways they're also quite visible,
right?
We don't feel behind in terms of our health, we don't feel behind in terms of aging, we
don't feel behind in terms of our personal development, we feel behind based on things
that we think that other people can see.
So I think let's start with the biggest one that I heard from you all, which is career
goals.
I think this is the most common of the three because it feels like something that we really
need to grow and so the time we spend on it and the results feel like an investment,
they feel very precious.
When it comes to relationships, you could meet the love of your life tomorrow and complete
that part of your story, but your career takes a little bit longer to establish and it
feels very intentional.
So we put a lot of pressure on ourselves to get it right the first time around, to get
it right straight out the great because we don't want to spend like five years doing something
that we think we love or we think we'll be fulfilling and then we hit 30 and it's like
a waste of our time.
That's how we interpret it, we have to start again.
We want to feel like we're doing things productively, we want to feel like we're making a contribution
to our future.
And so I think that fear of not getting it right the first time, that fear of not knowing
of uncertainty, it really keeps us in places, in industries, in careers, in fields, in
jobs that we don't fully love because we don't want to sacrifice the security of experience
and have to start again.
We also don't want to feel like a failure, right?
We don't want people to catch up with us and ask us how is work going and be like,
yeah, it's all right.
It's fine.
As if we should be doing more, as if we're wasting how time or wasting our lives doing
something that we don't...
