When It Feels Like Everyone Else Is on Track

There is a particular experience that tends to arrive in the late twenties and thirties, and it tends to arrive with engagement parties, house warming parties, weddings, and baby announcements. You are genuinely happy for the people you love. You are also, somewhere underneath that happiness, aware of a comparison being made. Between where they are and where you are. Between the life they appear to be building and the life you are living. Between the cultural and societal scripts and your current position in relation to them.

That awareness is uncomfortable, and it tends to be accompanied by a layer of self-reproach: you should not feel this way, you are being self-centred, you are failing to simply be happy for others, you are making it all about yourself. But the feeling does not respond to being told it is wrong. It tends to require a more honest examination.

 

The script and where it comes from

Most people in their twenties and thirties are carrying an implicit script about how adult life is supposed to unfold: a relationship by a certain age, a commitment, possibly a marriage, possibly children, a status job, a house and/or car purchase. The accumulation of the markers that signal that an adult life is ‘on track’. These scripts are absorbed from families, culture, and from social media feeds that curate other people’s milestones into a continuous stream of apparent success.

The scripts are not chosen; typically they are inherited. And their power does not depend on whether you consciously endorse them or not. The power of these scripts operates below that level, as a standard against which your life is quietly being measured, by yourself and sometimes by others.

The person who is single at thirty-four, or forty-four, or who has not yet found the job they hoped for, has not purchased a property, or who is watching their social world reorganise itself around couples and families while their own life looks different; this person is not behind. They are simply on a different timeline. But the family, cultural and societal scripts do not make these distinctions, and feeling that variation of paths taken as a failure of personal progress, rather than simply a difference in trajectory, is very easy to do.

 

What the social occasions actually involve

Weddings, house warming parties, family gatherings are often where the questions from one’s community arise. These events tend to intensify the feelings of ‘otherness‘ in a specific and sometimes acute way. Being a bridesmaid or a groomsman at a third wedding. Becoming a godparent to another friend’s child. Sitting at the family table and fielding the questions about when it will be your turn. Each of these a potentially challenging encounter to navigate, where the gap between the scripted expectations and the realities of your life, may be judged or scrutinised.

What tends to make these occasions hardest is not the external event but the external and internal comparison narratives, that runs alongside. The feeling of being measuring up against others. The internal wondering. The moments of genuine celebration interrupted by a private awareness or anxiety regarding your own situation, that you would rather not be having.

 

The loneliness that is hard to name

There is a specific loneliness that accompanies this experience, and it is hard to name because it sits alongside a full social life. The person experiencing this type of loneliness is typically not isolated. Often they are surrounded by people they love, attending events, having an active social life, feeling included I the lives of their peers. But that social world is reorganising itself around a set of experiences that you might not share, and the quality of that inclusion can shift as a result. The conversations change. People’s priorities shift. The ease of connection that existed before the divergence of life paths can become harder to maintain.

This is not anybody’s fault. It is the ordinary consequence of lives moving in different directions. But it produces a real and significant loneliness that is difficult to speak about. Partly because it sounds ungrateful and partly because the people best placed to understand it are navigating their own similar experiences.

 

The difference between behind and different

The framing of being behind implies a shared track on which some people are further along than others. It is worth questioning whether that track is real, or whether it is a social construction (a particular set of cultural expectations about what a life should look like and when) that may or may not reflect what you actually want.

Many people in their late 20s, and thirties who feel behind, have not (on closer examination) chosen the script that they are measuring themselves against. They have absorbed it. When asked what they actually want (not what they think they should want, not what the script prescribes, but what they genuinely want from their lives and their relationships), the answer is sometimes more complicated and more interesting than the standard narrative allows.

What you really want can be a challenging question to sit with. But it tends to be a more useful one than measuring the distance between your life and someone else’s expectations.

 

What therapy can offer

Therapy can offer a space to examine the personal, societal, family and cultural scripts honestly: where did they come from, what do they actually mean to you, and whether the life you are living is one you have chosen or one you have simply not yet managed to match to an inherited template.

Therapy can also offer a space for you to explore the understandable feelings of loneliness, anxiety, impatience or shame, and the grief of this experience, without those feeling being minimised or redirected toward optimism.

If the feeling that you are behind is getting difficult to carry, or watching everyone else arrive somewhere that you have not yet reached is leading you to feel anxious, lonely or overwhelmed, you are welcome to get in touch.

Dr Erin Reid is a counselling psychologist offering online therapy to individuals, couples, adolescents, and families across the UK and internationally. Visit drerinreid.com to find out more.