Read this if you're feeling behind in life | Just Reflections - Issue #45
Have you ever looked at others doing their thing online and felt like everyone just has everything figured out and you're just behind in life? Well, you're not alone.
I know I said I'll talk about outrage culture but this is where my mind's at right now so we'll have to do that another time. Today's about feeling behind in life.
Continuing on our social media escapades, you're scrolling through Twitter or Instagram, minding your own business—yeah, minding your own business on social media, funny—then you come across the profile of a young person. A very young, very talented, very successful young person. Someone who's done more in their 18 years than you'll ever do in your lifetime. You look at their pictures and read the comments. And you find comments from other people who're younger, more talented and more successful than you.
You think, “they were probably born into rich families.” Then you watch the Forbes video about their life and discover that they were a survivor of the war in their home country and they walked 50km at age 5 to get to safety and spent most of their childhood as a refuge and all their success is pretty much self-made. At this point, you're feeling really inadequate.
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After two hours of doom-scrolling, you put your phone down and lift your head to look at your very regular life. Now, depending on who you are you might feel inspired by this and think, “one of these days it's going to be me.” But if you're like me, you feel like you're behind in life.
I've felt like this countless times, particularly when I look at my peers who seem to have everything going right for them. Reminds me of Aristotle's rhetoric;
“We envy those who are near us in time, place, age, or reputation … those whose possession of or success in a thing is a reproach to us: these are our neighbors and equals; for it is clear that it is our own fault we have missed the good thing in question.” — Aristotle
Yep, feels like their success is “a reproach to us.” A reminder of our incompetence because, after all at some point we were at the same place in life. Maybe we even had better grades than them in school but that means nothing now. So it must be our fault that they are ahead in life and we're trailing.
Social media gets me a lot on this one. I always feel like everyone everywhere is making progress in leaps and bounds and I'm just crawling. If I could just put my head down and work harder for the next three years, I could get there too. It's really exhausting!
Fortunately, there's some good news.
Comparing ourselves to other people is quite natural and, done right, it's actually quite helpful. So I'm sure I'm not a total loser for doing it.
When we see other people do things better than us, we have an opportunity to ask what they're doing differently and learn from them. Maybe this is not very apparent now but think of it in the olden days of subsistence farming. When you saw your neighbour's crops growing much better than yours, that was a chance to ask them what they were doing differently and learn from them. They could probably learn some things from you too and you'd both be better off. Many societies progressed at impressive rates because of this. It was healthy because social circles were limited in size so the people you knew and could compare yourself with were just as limited. Their circumstances were not too different from yours, either.
There's a popular term called Dunbar's number—named after Robin Dunbar, the British anthropologist who coined it. According to Wikipedia;
“Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person.” -- Wikipedia
There's a bit of contention about the actual number but the important point is that there's a limit to the number of people you can sustain meaningful relationships with at a time. This means, there's a limited number of people you can compare yourself with and feel like it's “a reproach” to yourself. And those people are, rightfully, close enough to you that you can talk to them and you mutually help each other.
Unfortunately, social media throws a huge spanner into all of this by wildly increasing the people whose lives we have a window into. So we have full prime time access to people on the other side of the world. People who are living completely different lives from us under completely different circumstances. And those are the people we compare ourselves to.
So If I fill all my Dunbar spots with successful young people on the internet, I'll definitely feel behind in life. Because my frame of reference is a group of very rich, successful and talented teenagers. Meanwhile, I'm 33 and I'm still trying to figure out where my life is going.
Of course, the solution is not to spend my time looking at people who are definitively worse than me so that I feel better about myself. That's also a really unhealthy comparison and will likely lead me to the same horrible feelings.
A better approach, if you're going to expand outside your Dunbar number, is to spend your time looking at people who inspire you and people who blew up later in life.
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While this is better, it's still problematic. Primarily because it still reinforces the idea that you have to have a certain specific flavour of success and you have to do it by a certain age, albeit a later one.
When we put ourselves under pressure because of these two things, success and time, we inevitably will feel behind in life. That's because they're the very definition of being behind in life; not reaching a certain level of success by a certain age.
For me—and likely many other people, I can't be the only one—this is caused by the haunting feeling that if I don't achieve a certain level of success, then I won't receive enough love and respect from the people I care about. So I toil away to earn love and respect. That's probably why I'm such a workaholic.
In fact, during a certain period in my life, I actively avoided people I went to high school with because I felt that if a conversation came up, I wouldn't have much to say about my life. I felt like they wouldn't respect me because I wasn't successful enough.
I've since learned that my struggle wasn't really with being worthy of other people's love and respect. It was with being worthy of my own love and respect. And as long as I didn't love myself enough without what I had defined as success at my age, I wouldn't accept that other people could. Success had become a proxy for self-love. After all, working extra hard felt like something I could control, “If I could just put my head down and work harder for the next three years, I could get there too.” The worst part about this is that the more elusive success seems, the worse you feel.
A better solution is to redefine what success means to you in a more healthy way. After struggling with it for some time, this is how I'm redefining success; limiting the regrets I'll have at the end of my life by;
Cultivating great relationships with people, and
Doing work that's meaningful to me.
If you've been reading the newsletter for a while you've likely noticed this recurring motif. Here's are some examples:
I even “came up” with some written personal values that align with my new definition of success. I use quotes because they're mostly ripped off from Jason Lengstorf, but well I resonate with them so they're mine too now. Here they are:
Set clear expectations
Be kind, not nice
Make the right thing the easy thing
Keep showing up
Find joy in learning
Be the tide that lifts all ships
Finally, notice that this new definition of what success is to me is not tied to any timing. Regardless of how old I am, I can cultivate better relationships with people around me and seek more meaningful work. I don't need to do it by a certain age. And I think on my deathbed, if I look around and I have people I love, I've made a positive difference in people's lives and I've done work that will mean something after I'm gone, I'll die a satisfied guy.
2022 Resolutions:
Weight: Get to 75kg by April 28 and 70kg by July
I've started going to the gym again and I was ranting yesterday on Twitter about how horrible I feel after running and how bored I feel during the run. People who claim to "feel amazing" and "so full of energy" after gym are lying to us.
Sleep: Consistently sleep avg. 8 hours per day
Averages this week:
Duration: 5h 45m.
Avg. bedtime: 01:40.
Avg. wake-up time: 08:36.
Business: Start a business in 2022
Met my co-founder in person for the first time this week. It was great hanging out and nice to finally see that he's a real person. Attended a few events in the London startup scene as well. It was good fun and we made some good connections (by we I mean he, I'm not great with talking to strangers).