463. The 5 reasons you’re not as behind as you think

0:05 Hello everybody, I'm Gemma Speck and welcome back to the Psychology of Your 20s, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments and transitions of our 20s and what they mean for our psychology. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. It is so lovely to have you here back around these parts today as we discuss the psychology of our 20s, specifically the five reasons you are not as behind as you think.

0:42 This has to be one of the most prominent, I would say the most widely felt experiences of our 20s and probably our 30s as well. This sense that life is this race and There is a big checklist of things that we need to do and we need to accomplish. And we are all simultaneously failing. There is somebody ahead of us who is doing more, who has accomplished more.

1:07 And if we don't catch up to them and we don't catch up to them soon, well, some big bad thing is going to transpire and we're never going to be happy. We're never going to be successful. We're going to be miserable for the rest of our lives. I have felt this countless times in my 20s so far. I genuinely feel like it's my little emotional shadow at this stage. And I'm fairly certain a lot of you have felt it as well, which is kind of funny.

1:29 And it's ironic because if we are all feeling behind, who exactly is ahead? It's a tricky feeling. What we have to realize is that this feeling is actually one of our brain's favorite ways to catastrophize. And yet, a lot of what it tells us is highly, highly inaccurate. And it's based on a series of cognitive fallacies that we can actually counteract and really dig into and disprove.

1:55 So today, I actually want to break down these fallacies. I want to break them down one by one so that you can kind of view your situation and the sensation of feeling behind a bit more realistically and hopefully realize how far ahead you are, how much progress you've made, why you are exactly where you need to be And how to release this anxiety before it causes you to make irrational decisions or to not like yourself because that's one of the worst things you can do when you are up against this feeling. So without further ado, let's get into the five reasons you are not as behind as you think based on the psychology. So the first reason you're not as behind as you imagine yourself to be actually has, I think, very little to do with

2:43 what you have or haven't accomplished or what you have or haven't done. And it has everything to do with who and how you compare yourself to others. One of the main reasons I think you may feel behind is that when you compare yourself to other people of, let's say, around the same age who are pursuing the same goals that you want to pursue, oftentimes you are comparing yourself to the very best or the most visible version of this.

3:13 And that is what's making you miserable. This is a cognitive bias. It actually has a name. It's called the survivorship bias. And it occurs when we mistake the subgroup of the most successful as the entire group. And because we aren't what we would deem one of the most successful, we therefore, you know, we're not part of the majority.

3:35 We are not part of this group of everybody else who's doing great. We are in this small special group of failures. These kind of groups don't exist. Social media especially is one of the main culprits here in making us feel this way when that's not how life works. It's normal to experience comparison. It's normal to really pay attention to success stories. But I think nowadays, because people choose to share so much more, social media gives the impression of visibility over others' lives. that gives the impression of a full story when actually even that full story is still curated. Even when we are seeing other people's failures, they are still the failures that they have chosen to show us. There is still some kind of facade that

4:24 makes things always look polished. I'm somebody with a social media presence. I would say it's a modest one, but still. And I've even found that if I share vulnerable stuff and if I share my failures... I kind of only shared like sexy failures. Like I'm not sharing the full extent of things and I'm definitely not sharing the regularity at which they're happening. Like I'm not going to talk about business failures or financial failures or tax failures or family failures, mainly for privacy if I'm being honest. But I do still think like I know I'm doing it.

4:57 I know everybody else is doing it and I know that it's contributing to this collective image that we know our own pain and we know our own failures very well We think we know others because we think we have this visibility over their lives. We really don't. We really don't. And I think we all know like, yeah, social media is fake, but even the stuff that doesn't look fake is still sometimes fake. That's what I'm trying to say. And then on top of that, the content that doesn't talk about that stuff still continues to rise to the surface. Content that is lavish, successful, that shows a very particular kind of of lifestyle is compelling and is something that we are going to pay more attention to,

5:45 especially since we don't see it very often in the real world. Science backs this up. It backs up the fact that social media is literally optimized to show us aspirational content. I would really recommend this book. It's called The Chaos Machine by Mark Fisher, and he dives into this more. And what he basically says is how Instagram and TikTok is a machine that was programmed by people who really understood the brain. And it works because it selects the most provocative and emotional content and feeds that to us. That means the bad stuff, obviously, but it also just means a selection of outliers. It shows us outliers, which is why we only ever see the most lavish, perfect version of life or the most awful tragedies or

6:31 the most shocking stuff. And we would, if it's natural, we're seeing that all the time, begin to think that that's all the world is. And the reason that we're getting shown this stuff is because it triggers an emotional reaction. It triggers envy, it triggers comparison, it triggers confusion, jealousy, all of which are complex emotions that keep us going back to the source, keep us going back to social media.

6:58 A study from 2022 actually had I think it was like 300 people in the US look at 20 social media influencer posts. And afterwards they measured their effective wellbeing. Effective wellbeing basically means like the intensity of your positive and negative emotions. And they also measured their level of envy and their level of inspiration towards the influencer. What the study revealed was a negative correlation between looking at social media posts and wellbeing. They also noticed A positive correlation, I will say, between this same feeling and occasionally feelings of inspiration, but only when the content or the lifestyle felt reachable. And most of it doesn't. And most of us just gives us the impression that we are absolutely

7:48 failing at life. We are existing in these online environments, sometimes for six plus hours a day. And these are environments that are designed to intentionally make you feel bad about yourself. I don't think it's the content creator's fault. I think it's what gets pushed and what becomes popular. And so the reason you feel so behind is because you are sitting in this artificial space that's just meant to make you feel really bad about yourself. And I think you would notice that if you got off your phone, even for a couple of days, got off social media, even for a couple of days, if you stepped out of this atmosphere environment, like this space, you would feel so much better. And you would actually just realize and

8:35 have this deep epiphany of how normal most people's lives are and how well you really are doing. Even if you're not where you want to be yet, I truly do believe maybe you're just exactly where you need to be. Not everyone can be the most successful version of themselves in their 20s. In fact, I actually... I don't think it's that healthy to be that. I don't think it's healthy to be the best at something and to be everything you've ever wanted to be at 25. So don't discount your progress and your achievements just because somebody is doing more or because you think that you could be doing more. Sometimes it happens according to plan. It all is going to be okay. I also believe that we get into this trap of feeling like we're behind because

9:21 we're And this is the second reason we feel behind. We treat envy like it is something to be avoided rather than something that can actually be useful or manageable. Now, that might sound like it contradicts what I just said. I just said social media makes us feel bad because it elicits feelings of jealousy and jealousy in itself must be negative and hurtful and wrong. Therefore, we must avoid social media, get away from it so that the jealous feelings go away. I want to explain a little bit further though, because that's actually not what I mean. We cannot separate the feeling of envy and the feeling of being behind. That also means that if we treat envy differently and we change our relationship to it, our sense

10:03 of being behind will also perhaps lessen and also improve. Typically, I would say this is for the majority of people, when we experience an emotion like envy or or jealousy or anything like that, our greatest reaction is just to get as far away from it as possible. Like really psychologically put as much distance between us and that feeling as we can. We've definitely been socialized that jealousy is bad.

10:30 It's unpleasant. It's uncomfortable. It's selfish. So when it naturally comes up because it's a human emotion and it will, all that is met with is guilt and shame and self-judgment. And that just makes us feel really crap. Envy has levels and envy has layers to it that is not spoken about enough. There is benign envy and there is malicious envy. Malicious envy creates inferiority, means that we may try and tear somebody down, disregard them, undermine them. Malicious envy is not helpful and it's the kind of envy that ruins our self-esteem and it doesn't make us feel good.

11:04 It doesn't make us a good person either. Benign envy or emulative envy on the other hand It's actually motivational and it's aspirational. And so what that means is that it encourages us to actually do more. And I think this is for two reasons. The first reason why benign or emulative envy helps us be better is that if we are jealous of a situation, that provides some of the clearest evidence that that is actually what you want in life. So the reason that envy, benign envy is helpful, it is like one of the clearest evidence big red flags, big shining lights pointing to something that you secretly want and that you secretly desire. It is a mirror. Envy is a mirror because if you didn't secretly want that,

11:50 why would you be having such an intense reaction about somebody who has it? Secondly, I think benign envy then shows us what is possible. We wouldn't feel jealous of something if it didn't exist. The proof that this person has it and it exists is proof that we can also have it. Here's this person. I'm feeling this conflicting emotion.

12:08 Perhaps the best direction for that emotion to take is towards curiosity and is about examining the steps that they took to obtain the thing that I really want for myself. I want that life. I want that relationship. I want that feeling. So rethink envy. Rethink the negative sensation that is attached to that feeling. And I think you suddenly have access to such a powerful emotional force that you can harness. I read this. Actually, I don't think I read this. I think a friend told me about this interesting relationship that Michael Jackson and Prince had. And they had this rivalry where they really drove each other to perform better. And Michael Jackson would be like, well, I have to do this because if I don't do it,

12:48 Prince is going to do it. Prince is going to steal my idea. And it really pushed them both to be the artists that they became and to have these legendary legacies that because they used envy as a compass and as a form of motivation. So I think that's another reason why you aren't as behind as you think.

13:10 You're not treating envy in a way that it can help you. And I think if you were, you would realize that whilst you sit looking at somebody else's life feeling jealous of it, there is so much that maybe you could be doing to gain a life that's not the same, but might feel similar and might make you really happy. The other thing And the third reason why I think you feel behind is because whilst you are comparing yourself to these phenomenal individuals, you might not realize how many people are comparing themselves to you. And you probably don't appreciate that you yourself are an outlier, especially in a global context. I think there is a lot that you are not giving yourself credit for that you

13:53 should be. And I want to kind of shine a light on that after this short break. So stay with us. I want to present some statistics for you here about what the average person is doing and what the average person has achieved in their 20s just so that we all as a group have a healthier perspective on like what is actually normal because I feel like we don't.

14:20 So firstly, money. I'm just going to say, disclaimer, I'm going to base this on statistics from the UK because that's where I live now. But imagine, well, I don't think things would be that radically different to other countries that are perhaps similar. So do your own research on this, but I think that you would find it's probably quite similar.

14:41 So money. According to a 2026 finder survey, 18 to 24 year olds have an average of 3,000 pounds in savings, whilst the average 25 to 34 year old has 11,000 pounds. You're probably thinking like, wait, actually that sounds like a lot. Remember the average is skewed. The average is skewed by people who have a lot of savings or people who are, have trust funds or who are high earners. In fact, that survey dug a little bit further and it showed that two in five people of all ages have a thousand pounds or less in savings. A quarter, 25% have 200 pounds less or less in savings. And 16% of people had no savings at all. That is a serious amount of people without much money. Forget being able to go on luxury holidays. Like Forget fancy clothes. The majority

15:32 of people probably couldn't cover an emergency payment, and yet we are thinking that we are behind because we can't afford the Ritz or a freaking designer handbag, thinking that that is the norm. Now, this isn't meant to be like making people feel bad and be like, look how awful everybody has it. Ha, ha, ha. Look how good we have it. No. I just think it is so vital that you understand that norm and the global norm of what somebody your age is probably doing. Most people in their 20s cannot afford all these fancy dinners at restaurants and trips and new clothes and just all the luxuries that we think that we need. What's more, like maybe you can afford that, but it's probably wise not to choose those things as well. Like perhaps you are

16:23 saving for a bigger purchase, you're trying to pay off debt, you're trying to help your family, whatever it is, Financial insecurity is actually more normal than not just financial security, but financial luxury. So put that in perspective. Remember that next time you think, oh my God, I should have more in my bank account. Another big one is home ownership.

16:46 I feel like that is a very pressing thing in our 20s and 30s. The average age for home ownership is 34. Average, again, still skewed. And the number of people in that age is just getting higher and higher and higher. Because getting on the property ladder is harder and harder and harder. Homeownership, money, the standard we have in our mind, the standard that is our perception is highly different to the standard that is reality. Let's talk about some other non-material things. What about friends? How many friends do you think people have? If you were basing this off of your own perception or what you see online, you would probably say the average person has 12 friends, 20 friends. The answer is the average person has one

17:30 to four close friends. Additionally, actually, the average person has like two friends. And we actually might only be able to psychologically manage having five close friends, according to what we know as Dunbar's number. Dunbar's number of theory of friendship was an idea put forward by this British psychologist.

17:49 His name is Robin Dunbar in the 90s. He is my dream guest on the podcast. So if anybody... I've emailed him so many times. So I was going to say, if anybody has his number, he knows I'm trying to get a hold of him. He doesn't want to come on the podcast. But what he basically said was that our brains and our capacity as social creatures is limited.

18:12 And we really only have so many relationships that we can juggle. When we see somebody who has 30 close friends, 20 close friends, A group of friends, it's like 10 people and they all seem to get along. I really do think that there is stuff behind the scenes that you probably don't know about. It's very easy to look at that and think, God, they must be so happy. God, what a luxury. And not realize how many internal disputes there are, how many people feel excluded at times, how many times those same people still feel very, very lonely.

18:48 So that's another thing you have to be aware of when you're comparing. What about marriage? Let's talk about marriage and relationships and our relative norm versus our perception versus the reality. Again, using the UK data, the average age a person first marries is 31. In the 70s, it was 23. That is just the start. For every person getting married at 25, there's another person getting married at 35 or 40 or in their 50s and 60s. And for every person getting married at 31, there is somebody getting divorced at 40. You know, in some cases, I actually think this is the norm now. I think we say it's like 50% of people end up getting divorced.

19:30 I think it's around 42% now, like 42% of marriages end in divorce. There is a statistically significant portion of people who are entering into an engagement or a marriage in their twenties who look like they have everything together, who further down the line are going to realize they were with the wrong person. And so if you feel like that is really far off from you, you've got to remember your own timeline is like absolutely fine. And you might actually be saving yourself from a lot of grief. Dr.

20:00 Meg Jay, who we know and love, she's the author of The Defining Decade. We had her on the podcast. When she was on the podcast, she said something really interesting, which is that from her experience, so many 20-somethings get in touch with her and they feel like they're behind. And the thing she always says is that this is your training wheel decade. And what you think is behind is actually saving you from so much. Our 20s aren't about getting everything done. They're about getting things started. They're about experimenting. If you'd done everything you wanted to do in your 20s, everything you ever wanted to do in life in your 20s, what would the rest of your life be for? So when you take stock of your life,

20:40 please remember to include that more global, wider perspective of what the average of things is actually in reality, not just what you expect from yourself, not just thinking that what the average is, is what you want from your life. So to kind of summarize these points, you're not as behind as you think because you are only comparing yourself to allies. You are not as behind as you think because you are misconstruing envy as a negative emotion when it could be a powerful force. And you are not as behind as you think because you're not looking globally.

21:12 The fourth reason that you are not as behind as you think is also a perspective issue. And it's about something that we know of and we call the social clock. The social clock is a concept that was first introduced by the psychologist Bernice Newgarten all the way back in the 60s. And when Bernice introduced this idea, she basically suggested that a lot of our behavior is unconsciously controlled primarily by a social rather than a biological clock, and also rather than our own desires. Our life is controlled by what we think we should be doing based on what other people expect. We seem to have this idea in our minds of when we can and when we can't do things, or when we should and we shouldn't

21:54 do things, based on our age, and it's fundamentally driven by social norms that indoctrinate this certain appropriate timeline for life that's actually kind of bullshit. You know, you might hear people saying things like, I'm just too old to be living at home. I'm too old to go back to school. I'm too old to try that. I'm too young to apply for a job like this. Somebody my age should be married by now. Somebody my age should have had their first relationship. If I don't have a kid by this age, I'm never going to. Like that one maybe, but the rest of them, like where did this idea come from? How did we learn to be so constrained by age? And additionally, with like the biological clock thing as well, We have these ideas that if

22:39 I don't have a kid by 35, I'm basically barren. People have kids in their 50s these days. You are not as constrained by biology as you think. So the first thing to know is that the social clock, not the biological clock, we're back to the social clock, is culturally specific. This was demonstrated in this study published in the journal, I think it would have been the Social Psychology Bulletin or Social Psychology Journal. And it looked at the way that cultural beliefs impact the social clock in China and the US. Specifically, what they wanted to figure out was what were the earliest and the latest ages people in both places thought it was appropriate to engage in several life events. So things like getting married, having

23:22 a kid, starting a career. They wanted to show that the social clock that we think is universal is really just cultural. They found that the time windows were much different. So in the US, people felt like they had a much, much larger window to complete certain life milestones like getting married and having a baby and figuring themselves out. And in China, that window was narrower. The rigidity or flexibility of the window, whether it could be moved or not really, influenced the individual's experience of milestone anxiety and the individual's experience of being behind. And what they found was that Even without anybody really needing to say anything, when people fell outside these windows where they felt things were appropriate

24:05 to do or not do, they seemed to fundamentally have this sense of being off time. Without anybody really needing to say anything, it was so indoctrinated. What's interesting, though, is that they also found, well, this was a separate study, the majority of people don't abide by the social clock anyway.

24:21 That's because the social clock is meant to be corrective. It's meant to be punishing people. and preventative, I guess, rather than helpful. It is actually not the norm. It doesn't necessarily describe what most people are actually doing. It describes what we think culturally a person should be doing.

24:38 And then it gives us a way to judge ourselves when our lives don't match up with those expectations. The social clock specifically, I think, what it does is that it convinces us that age is evidence and that we age and mature in identical ways. Age is evidence of where we should be. Age is actually just information about how long you've been alive for. It's literally just a way of measuring time and measuring maybe health. Age cannot tell you whether you are ready for marriage. The age you are does not determine your emotional maturity. Your age does not give you evidence that the right career is, like just because you're 22 doesn't mean your career is right or wrong and that you should know. Like age

25:20 does not predict or tell you like what is right for you. It's just how old you are. The reason you are feeling behind is because you see age as the biggest determinant of what you should or shouldn't be doing yet. And the thing is, is that people have been disproving the belief that there is a certain timeline that makes people happy for so long. Like some of the happiest people alive got married at 60. They didn't find a job they loved until they were 50. Because our 20s and life in general is defined by this lack of definition, I think we crave anything that can add structure or definition to back into our lives. And that blueprint that is provided by the social clock just seems to be the easiest thing to grab onto. If

26:02 I live my life exactly according to this plan, society has said that I will be happy. I actually don't think it's that helpful and I actually don't think it's the guarantee for happiness that we think it is. I think if you are finding yourself victim to the social clock, go searching for all the people who haven't abided by this timeline and have yet still found extreme joy, and extreme happiness. Because I actually think it's most people. Also, perhaps observe, if you want, the people who have abided by the timeline. Do they seem happier to you? No, I actually don't think they do, because life is so much more nuanced than that. There is no guaranteed formula that if you do things this way, you will be happy.

26:47 There is a socially prescriptive formula, but Yeah, as I said, I don't know about you. I encounter slash I see a lot of people in my life, in my family, like just in general, who have done everything by the book and they don't seem to really be enjoying themselves. So just bear that in mind next time you feel like, if I'd done it this way, maybe I'd be more happy.

27:11 It's the classic grass is greener on the other side dilemma. So my next reason why you may not be as behind as you think is much more psychological. And I think it's a reality. I don't think, I know it's a reality that a lot of you have experienced and may still be living that you just don't acknowledge or give yourself credit for. You have spent a great deal of your life in survival mode and you are now comparing your progress to someone's end goal, not accounting for all the things that you had to survive and you had to endure and you had to get through which they probably didn't and they perhaps did not have to do or survive or endure. You are not giving yourself enough credit for the fact that your start line was

27:59 different to everyone else's. It's not about making excuses for yourself. I know a lot of people feel very opposed to that. I really just think it's about having grace towards your environment and to the fact that not everybody's environment and start line was the same. We spent a lot of time talking about privilege on this podcast and talking about things like financial inheritance and money and how people are better set off if their parents were making more and if their parents had a good education and their parents had a good job. Huge advantages. Those are massive advantages. However, I think one of the greatest gifts we can receive that a lot of us don't is a strong emotional inheritance from our parents and from our support systems. It

28:44 is the gift of a loving home, a loving support system that arms us with the belief that we can really step into the world and we can be resilient and optimistic. And if something goes wrong, there is somebody who is going to help us with that problem. A lot of people don't have that. And when we don't have that and we feel like we're really on our own, we expend a lot more resources just trying to feel secure and trying to feel safe. And we expend those resources.

29:11 We just have to really deal with that before we can turn our mind towards our actual ambitious true dreams. Your dream is just to get through this. Other people's dreams who aren't going through this is to like, I want to be a millionaire. I want to do all that. I want to be an artist. You haven't had the time for that yet. So what actually puts us in survival mode? A lot of things. It can be everything from emotional neglect to experiencing a family breakdown at a young age, chronic trauma, grief at a young age, mental or physical illness at a young age, a natural disaster, having to immigrate, moving around a lot. Anything that disrupts our emotional and physical equilibrium or sense of homeostasis can

29:58 send an internal message from an early time in our lives that we are not safe. And when we don't feel safe, we don't have the mental resources to focus on flourishing. Flourishing and surviving are opposed. On the outside, if you are somebody who has been in this survival state or in survival mode for a while, yeah, your life might seem really, really normal. You actually might have a really great job and you might have a really great partner and really good friends. you might be really, really amazing at hiding this part of you and compartmentalizing and functioning very well. That can make it hard for others to recognize. It can also make it hard for ourselves to recognize that we are still struggling things that

30:41 are making life harder. But deep down, there is a much different picture here. You might think I'm doing really well, but when you are in survival mode, your brain and your body is just hijacked by the sympathetic nervous system. It is hijacked by a continuous hypervigilance and a continuous fight or flight response, which makes you feel constantly on edge.

31:05 Your body, it's not constantly being flooded with cortisol and adrenaline the way that we imagine, but there is always a low level of tension. Even when it comes to neurological activity and the energy that you can put into certain thought processes, You don't have time for that. Your prefrontal lobe is already planning and redirecting and trying to figure out something else. And your fear center is overriding all of its plans anyways. It's harder to function. Those in survival mode may feel very emotionally numb. There's physical symptoms.

31:43 There's fatigue. And then there's just this feeling of like, how come I can't organize my thoughts and make sense of my life like other people can? Because you've got so much in your mind. It can also warp our perception of time and really cause it to feel either hyper accelerated or painfully slow. And that itself contributes to that feeling that we are behind explicitly. For example, there was one study in 2015 by researchers in the UK, and they found that people who have experienced trauma, specifically events that have led us to have a loss of trust or confidence in the world, People who've experienced this are more likely to encounter a phenomenon known as a sense of foreshortened future. A sense of foreshortened future is

32:29 essentially the feeling that your future does not exist. If you have gone through trauma or something really hard, you may find that it's really hard, really difficult to imagine yourself getting married, imagine yourself happy, imagine yourself at 50, Think about what that does to your ability to feel like you are progressing through life. It is incredibly difficult to build towards a future that your brain actually does not acknowledge and does not believe exists because it's just shut that off. Other people are able to make five-year plans and they're able to take risks and they understand that investing is probably worthwhile because, yeah, of course they're going to be alive at 50 to use that money

33:09 and they understand the importance of long-term goals. For you, no. Survival mode keeps your attention anchored to what is happening right now. So what needs fixing? What could go wrong? What do I need to get through today? The long-term planning is not a priority. It's not a priority until one day, maybe you exit survival mode and you look up and you realize, oh, wait a second, wait a second.

33:31 I don't think I got the same memo as everybody else. Why didn't I do all these planning things? Why do I feel so behind? This is where you need to show yourself some unconditional grace, unconditional compassion and as much of those things as you have available to you, you were living on a shorter psychological timeline. Your brain literally did not imagine the future. You had other priorities. Your nervous system was constantly making you hypervigilant, unable to think about flourishing or fulfillment. And I think you need to give yourself credit for the fact that you've accomplished so much just by enduring and surviving that. In my eyes, that's an achievement in itself. I know that's a complicated feeling.

34:11 I do think it's an achievement. your emotional and psychological resume is stacked. Even if your professional resume or career resume isn't where you'd like it to be, your psychological resume, sorted. I also think it's never too late to start over and start planning and to try again, but also try again for the first time. But truly, please, if you resonate with this right now, I need you to know, I just so desperately want to impress upon you In my eyes, and I think in many other people's eyes, you were not behind. If the start line was here, everybody else was starting from that point and you just had to, you got dropped at the wrong location. You were all the way back there. You've already run like

34:58 a whole nother race before you have started the race that the majority of people are now enduring. So please have some kindness towards yourself. Okay, I want to talk about the final two reasons you are not as behind as you think and some advice for when you still feel that way after this short break. So before the break, we talked about survival mode. In my opinion, I actually think more and more of us are encountering this survival state these days outside of childhood. Yes, because of childhood trauma or childhood experiences. but also because life is actually just getting a lot harder. And I do think the bar for surviving is just, I don't think, I feel like I know this. It's just been raised significantly. Like

35:50 this wouldn't be like a proper episode about why we feel behind if we didn't acknowledge the fact that the world we have inherited is, to put it lightly, a bit of a shit show. It's just not going great. So much of what we've talked about in this episode, milestone anxiety, the social clock, comparison, it's partly because an older generation dictated what should be possible based on experiences that we can no longer afford and based on a world that no longer exists. And that is the standard we are measuring ourselves to. Housing is really expensive. Grad jobs feel non-existent. Everything costs more. So when your sole focus is now how in the world am I actually going to afford to live, bigger dreams and bigger ambitions

36:43 do get put on hold and therefore so does a more meaningful version or feeling of progress. There are two psychology terms you should know that describe this really, really well and describe why this is making you feel behind or fall behind. The first is a well-known one. It's the idea of a scarcity mindset. And the second is less well known. It's called the cognitive bandwidth tax. They're very much related and they are very much impacting us whilst we encounter this world that feels very difficult to be in. To begin with, let's talk about the scarcity mindset.

37:18 So put simply, a scarcity mindset occurs when our preoccupation with a lack of resources means that we make irrational decisions. I often talk about this with regards to dating. You probably heard it in a dating episode, but in this context, when you get in a rut or a spiral and you start imagining that you're never going to meet anyone and there's really no good fish left in the sea, this often means that we end up settling for less because we don't have that broader view of abundance or a sense of possibility when it comes to love. The same applies to all other choices that we make in life.

37:53 The scarcity mindset is quite universal in that way. If you feel like jobs are scarce and you're not going to take big risks and you're not going to feel like progress is happening. If you feel like money is scarce, you're not going to invest. You're not going to feel like progress is being made towards your savings. If you feel like it's going to take longer to find a career you love, you're not going to take a gap year.

38:11 You're not going to take time off. You're not actually going to explore interest. You're not going to feel like there is this progress towards having a fulfilling life. The very real sense of scarcity that we are feeling right now because of the state of the world blocks our ability to be ambitious and build better long-term goals that require sacrifices now or long-term rewards. We don't make those sacrifices now because we don't believe those sacrifices will pay off considering the state of everything. And this is why we feel behind our sense of abundance and what feels possible both now and in the future feels restricted. And yet we are comparing ourselves to people for whom that context is not the same. Like they are not experiencing

38:54 this in the same way. That second concept I mentioned before is also important, and it's similar to the effect of survival mode. The cognitive bandwidth tax is the idea that I spoke about. It was first proposed by these two researchers at Princeton and MIT, and they basically realized when we have to constantly worry about our basic needs, our attention becomes so narrowly focused on that one thing, it's sometimes called in psychology, attentional tunneling, and we are just so focused on trying to problem solve that, that Everything else in our life becomes secondary and our personality does become quite stagnated. This is particularly relevant for people in their 20s and 30s today. You can't focus on

39:39 having it all. You can't work towards having it all because you need to have a job and you need to find a way to make money. And we are Continuously comparing ourselves to a previous version of the world where that was less of a concern, like there were more opportunities. This is probably the most important message in this whole episode. Our perception of what it means to be ahead or what it means to be successful has been skewed in so many ways. The reality of how much it takes to get there is a lot greater and harder. As a result, we are facing increasing anxiety to do with, you know, is this going to work or work out? How am I going to find my path?

40:23 More of us are feeling behind because what it takes to be ahead is just greater. So when you are drowning under these fears, I want you to remember three critical facts, three critical mindset shifts, three critical things just to remember. Number one, the goal in life is to collect experiences and not to speed through them. There is this level of freedom we experience when we detach from the conceptualization of life as a race and we deeply analyze what is actually important to us and what it actually takes to be happy and what it actually takes for life to be meaningful. All these people who achieve amazing things, what do they inevitably go searching for in the end? Health and love, which are incidentally the things

41:08 that they have perhaps compromised in their pursuit of success. And in their allegiance to this strict timeline and this strict notion of what makes a person, the other thing they end up chasing is experiences. And they end up chasing all these things that are going to make them feel alive. It's why billionaires keep flying to the moon and they keep spending billions and millions of dollars to never age. They have given away all their time to the pursuit of their dreams and now they are trying to make up for it. And we have the luxury of that time and the luxury of those experiences. Maybe not flying to the moon, but Enjoying ourselves. Like you do not leave this world with accolades or your wealth

41:47 or your job title. You leave it with experiences and you leave it with the thoughts of the people who loved you. Those are things that you can collect even if the rest of your life is completely falling apart. Experience and connection are always available, I believe. And I'm not even thinking about good experiences or expensive experiences. Everything is an experience. Everything contains value. There's also this fascinating research that shows how people who experiment more, who try more things, who are more open to the novelty and the ups and downs of life, especially at a younger age, actually end up being better in the long run than people who just settled down and chose something very quickly

42:32 because they're better able to actually articulate what they do and don't like. They have more wisdom. They have more of a sense of preference. I think everything... Every experience is teaching you something that the easy path like just may not have. And one day when it's your time, you're going to look back at all these moments that just felt like really awful and frustrating. And you're going to realize it was teaching you a lesson that you would need one day. Like it's all these awful memories I've had from my early twenties. I like look at them now and I'm like, best lesson. So glad I learned that then. This brings me to my second truth.

43:07 Number two. No one's journey to success is ever linear, ever, ever, ever, no. The detours are, I tend to believe, the path. I was watching this podcast from Angela Duckworth. She's the woman who wrote the book Grit. Great book. And the book Situated, which just came out. Actually, I've been reading it. And she was talking about how up until the age of 31, she had literally no idea what she wanted to do with her life. And the very fact that she had no idea... she claims is what took her to places that she was meant to be in. That ambiguity, like the story gets filled with what is meant to be there and with meaningful things. Every success story you see, every single one, every single person who says I'm happy

43:48 with where I am, that is a story of a thousand failures. I don't know where I got that quote. I think it's a quote. I don't think I came up with that idea, but I think it's true. It's also an incredible mindset to have in your 20s. My failures count as much as my successes. If you knew that you were a hundred failures away from your like biggest win yet and from life working out, like you would get out there and you would start freaking failing.

44:12 And I actually do believe failure is a bit of a numbers game. So if you're feeling behind, maybe you're further ahead on that journey. However you want to say it to yourself or picture it, I think that's important. My final reminder for this whole episode, I know I'm full of wisdom today, but my final reminder, you have so much more time than you think. Every single time I interview someone who is 50 or 60, they always say the same thing to me, which is that in your 20s and 30s, you feel like this is the best it will ever be. You feel like life is already over and it's not. You have literally been an adult for less time than you have been a child.

44:47 If you are 25, you've been an adult for seven years. You were a child for 18 years. Give yourself a little bit of grace. Truly give yourself some credit for what you've been through, what you've been challenged by. how much you have done, how much you have achieved, how much you have seen, who you've been. I'm sure the list of what you have actually accomplished is much longer than you allow yourself to contemplate. You're being too humble.

45:12 You're being way too humble. And even if you still feel behind and you look at that list and you're like, oh God, maybe actually that's still not good. Behind who? Behind what? Every person that you are comparing yourself to, they have their own insecurities. They have things that they would look at you and they would look at your life and say, wow, yeah, I have this great career and I have all these things, but I never actually got to really just explore what I wanted. And actually, I never got to really travel and I never got to do those crazy nights with my friends and all I ever did was work. The grass is always greener.

45:50 That is one of the best ways to summarize this entire episode. so much of our sense of inadequacy is perception-based and it's based on who you're comparing yourself to, the fact that you are not acknowledging what you have survived and endured. It's based on the fact that you're comparing yourself to a life or a standard or an idea of where you should be that was determined by people like 50, 60 years ago and that world just doesn't exist yet. And it's a perception issue because you are believing that the most valuable experiences that you could have or the most valuable thing you could be is somebody who is successful, who has accolades and who has achievements.

46:33 And you are not counting your failures and your experiences and the fun that you've had the same way. You are not valuing that as an equal measure as the stuff that other people value. And I think if you were to really take those things as important and really saw them as like the currency of a good life, like you would have a And I would hope that you would really realize like how much you really have going for you and how much you've achieved. So that, my friends, is the five reasons. I think it's more than five, but let's say six, six reasons. I don't think you're as behind as you think you are. I hope this episode has been a bit of a solve for your worries and your anxieties that I often share.

47:15 I feel this very, very deeply as well. It is just a quintessential experience of this time in your life. Take it with a grain of salt. Please know that it's a feeling we just kind of have to endure. So I hope that this has helped you endure it a little bit better. If you have made it this far and you are listening on Spotify, leave a little white heart emoji below. Let me know that you made it to the end. I hope you enjoyed the episode.

47:40 And if you haven't yet, check out an episode on Netflix, please. It's like one of the easiest ways to help us out and just to show Netflix, show people that the podcast and video form matters. Obviously, you don't have to. it would be, I would very much appreciate it. Thank you as always to our researcher, Lucy Davidson. If you want more content like this, you can follow us on Instagram.

48:02 You can follow us on Substack. If you want episode transcripts or shorter version of this episode, of these episodes delivered directly to your inbox. But until next time, be safe, be kind. Remember that you are not as behind as your little silly brain thinks that you are. We will talk very, very soon.