Learning to let go of that feeling of being behind in life — Especially in your 20's
As I was going through the previous entries in my daily journal, I came across this line that I had penned down right after a particularly difficult period in my life:
You are on your own path, and you are on your own timeline. The more you focus on that, and the less you focus on everyone else, the happier you’ll be.
Over the last few weeks, I took on the task of figuring out why I wasn’t as happy as I used to be. A critical part of solving this problem was doing one of the hardest things I’ve ever done — being brutally honest with myself. The human brain is a fickle thing, and it’s hard to gauge the underlying reasoning and the true motives behind some of the things it feeds you. The exercise involved isolating the thoughts that got me down now and again and then asking myself a series of questions to delve deeper into the problem in order to figure out what’s causing them. It starts with a simple — “So why am I feeling this way?” and leads to the web slowly unraveling till you can hit the problem right at the source.
Doing this for a while not only helped me discover a lot of things about myself, but also helped me identify and solve the underlying issues that deterred my happiness. This blog post is about two of those underlying issues: One, my constant need for approval from my peers, and two, how I constantly compare my progress and accomplishments to theirs.
We have been conditioned from a very early age to fight our way up the social hierarchy, like school, for example. It doesn’t take long for you to find yourself competing for a position among the school’s elites — the jocks, the toppers, and the cool kids. You’re assigned a ‘rank’ within the social hierarchy, and the higher you are, the more people like you.
The problem is that human beings far too complicated to be formulated. Finding two people that are the same is next to impossible. So when you take all these people and set up templates that they need to follow to be deemed likable, a lot of those people are going to find it difficult to squeeze through. The misfits who do manage to get through are left with the difficult realization that those templates just made them sad and bitter because they never really felt like they fit in or were ever happy doing it. Once you’re done with education, you’re on your own to figure out what you want to do, and how you want to position yourself. You’re never told that not participating is even an option.
The truth is that everyone has a difficult life, no matter how privileged or happy they may seem. The only difference is in the way they choose to deal with it. Some of the happiest people you meet are the saddest people in real life, and everyone is going through tough things that they’re trying to deal with. The same goes for you.
When you read about that young person on social media who became insanely successful in a really short time, all you really see is the cover of the book. On digging deeper probably won’t be as enticed with what that person had to go through, and the work they had to put in every single day to keep their ventures afloat. At this point you’re comparing yourself with someone who’s routines aren’t tailored for you. Just because it worked for them doesn’t meant that it’ll work for you.
Now, what if you were able to reach the same level of success in ten years while leading a life that you find happy and fulfilling? Does it really make that big a difference if you’re successful ten years from now rather than right now? It’s impossible to fully understand where other people come from, what they’re dealing with, and what kind of advantages they might’ve had to get them to where they are.
The best way to deal with this, in my opinion, is to ignore the rat-race completely and focus on yourself. Stop thinking about life like it’s a race, a marathon, or whatever those motivational pages on social media tell you. You are your own person, with your own attributes, problems, advantages, disadvantages, and difficulties just like everyone else. Putting yourself on a pedestal against someone else doesn’t do anyone any good. However, focusing on yourself will yield much greater returns in both the short and long term.
So what if your friend is making more money than you, or moving faster up the corporate ladder than you, or living the life you always wanted to lead? As long as you have taken the steps toward getting there, and you’re headed in the right direction, just put your head down and get to work.
You are on your own unique journey, so don’t judge your progress based on someone else’s accomplishments at face value. Their path may be shorter than yours or maybe more tumultuous ahead, you never know. Focusing on other people results in losing focus on what matters —yourself.
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