How to Respond When You Feel Behind in Life
Do you ever feel like you’re behind in life?
We live in a success-oriented culture, where stereotypical milestones such as family, career, and wealth are viewed as the end goal.
A recent Pew Research study revealed that although Americans are divided on their beliefs in whether achieving the American dream is possible, 31% believe they’ve already achieved it and 36% think they’re on their way there.
A majority of Americans are trying to hit the same milestones in life, and many people are succeeding. It often feels like others are further along the path than we are, which can make us feel like we’re behind in life and need to catch up. This week, I realized that I currently feel this way, so I did some reflecting to try to understand why.
Why Do I Feel Behind in Life?
This summer has been a whirlwind of activity. In my world right now, there’s a constant flurry of friends getting married, buying houses, and starting families. It’s a celebratory, joyous season, but can also be stressful.
Seeing other people hit certain milestones has made me wonder — am I behind? While the obvious answer is no, I wondered, why do I feel this way? And does anyone else feel similarly?
Looking back at the last several years, getting married was a big milestone. Getting our cat was (almost) equally life-altering. Also, I just quit my job to start a new career!
I thought that once I achieved some of these milestones, I would feel like my life was more on track. However, I recently realized that there will always be another milestone on the horizon.
Are we ready to buy a home and start a family? Absolutely not. Are we feeling the pressure? Honestly, a bit. If you know me, you know I’m very goal-oriented and like to make sure I achieve things by the right deadlines.
Unfortunately, there’s no black-and-white rule book to life that tells us our correct timeline. That can make us uncomfortable. So what do we do? We look at our friends.
Comparing Our Lives When We Feel Behind
Friendships are not always, but often formed by similar life stages. Often we find ourselves surrounded by people progressing through life together.
We live our lives, watching our loved ones live theirs. Even as we rejoice in the milestones our friends are celebrating, we’re terrified of becoming irrelevant or being left out. We want to be surrounded by people who can both celebrate and mourn with us in our different seasons.
No one wants to be left behind. This results in the feeling of endlessly running on a hamster wheel, always struggling to keep up.
Optimizing Our Lives to Stay Ahead
This feeling of being in a race to the finish line causes us to worry about how we can ensure that our timeline is perfect. After all, life is short and the clock is ticking!
In our culture, we’ve managed to create a never-ending to-do list for ourselves. If you Google how much money you’re supposed to save before you’re 30, you’ll likely feel immediately stressed. You can actually start a college fund for your child before they’re even born. And did you know how much water you’re currently supposed to drink every day?
For me personally, some of life’s biggest milestones currently feel overwhelming. The average Bay Area home price just passed $2 million. Buying a house isn’t feasible for us right now, but it’s hard to not feel as if we’re running behind.
We all try to optimize our lives. We want to form the right relationships, achieve the right educational and career goals, earn the right amount of money, live in the right place, have the right hobbies, build the right families, and travel to all the right destinations. And we want to do all this in time to retire as soon as possible!
How Do We Respond to Feeling Behind?
When we recognize that we feel behind in life, how do we deal with it? How do we process the fact that our lives are often different than the lives of the people around us? How do we respond when we realize that sometimes, our lives don’t live up to our own expectations or desires?
1. Recognize the Beauty of Difference
Similarities are often what connect us. That’s why we frequently end up in friendships with those in similar life stages.
Theologian and scholar C.S. Lewis famously wrote, “Friendship arises out of mere Companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden). The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, ‘What? You too? I thought I was the only one.’”
Connecting through Similarities
Friendships are deeply powerful when we discover others with the same passions, priorities, and dreams. These similarities can be personality- or interest-driven, but they’re often much easier to find in others who are traversing through life at roughly the same speed as you are.
But the odds are extremely slim that you will ever follow exactly the same path as even your closest friends. To be honest, it would be a little weird if you did.
More importantly, our differences are equally as powerful as our similarities if we allow them to be. These differences can be in interests or background, but also in life stage. It’s important to not only embrace these differences when they occur naturally, but also seek out friends in differing life stages.
Seeking Out Differences
Intergenerational friendships have made a profound impact on my life. I’ve been blessed by the wisdom, patience, and life experience of people older than me. I’ve also been encouraged and humbled by the discernment, drive, and energy of high school students and children.
Everyone’s journey is unique. Regardless of your age, there is no optimal life stage. You might feel behind, but to someone else you might seem ahead. Having a mix of friends who are both ahead of you and behind you lends perspective.
Differences can be uncomfortable, but they diversify our experiences and give us a window into other people’s worlds.
2. Don’t Compare Your Life
Everyone’s timeline looks different. Even when we embrace our differences, comparison is still a challenge. How can we avoid comparing our lives to those of the people around us?
The ways we compare our lives can vary. For some people, the feeling of being left behind is foreign — these people are the trailblazers. If you’re an early adopter, the first to transition life stages, maybe your fear is that you’ll be left ahead, that you’ll arrive too soon before anyone is there to live life with you. However, others fear the idea of being left in the dust, with no one left to say “You too? I thought I was the only one.”
Regardless of whether you’re worried about being too early or too late, if you’re like me, you really want to end up solidly in the middle.
I asked myself, why is that? Why am I so determined to be average?
Even if my end goal is to end up in the exact middle (it’s not), measuring my life against everyone else’s is just exhausting. Maybe I subconsciously believe that I’ll “arrive,” that I’ll be able to rest once I hit a certain milestone. But if I’m only able to find comfort via comparison, I will never arrive.
One of my favorite quotes is attributed to Theodore Roosevelt: “Comparison is the thief of joy.” When it comes to feeling left behind in life, comparing your timeline to someone else’s will rob you of the joy of your current moment. So don’t compare your life stage to anyone else’s!
3. Have Peace with Your Actual Timeline
Ultimately, we have to recognize that things are out of our control. Meeting the right person, landing the right job, or buying the right house may not happen when we hope it will — or at all. We can make all the right choices and try to plan as much as we can, but trying to put our lives on a specific timeline is a recipe for disappointment.
So this week, when I identified that I was feeling left behind, I asked myself — do I trust God’s plan for my life?
I have anxiety and OCD, and the underlying struggle for me is always uncertainty. And that’s the truth for my timeline. It’s currently unwritten, so I just don’t know what it looks like. But I realized that while I might not always live in the truth of it, I do believe that God is in charge of everything and that He has a plan for me.
It might not look the way I want it to look — I don’t know what’s in store for my future. Does it include a fulfilling career, home, and family? I hope so, but if not God is still good.
So right now, instead of feeling left behind I’m trying to have peace with where I am and live fully in the moment. If you’re feeling similarly, I hope you can find that peace too!
