Feeling Behind in Life in Your 20s: How I Stopped Comparing and Started Living

For most of my early twenties, I lived with the constant, low hum of feeling behind in life in your 20s. There is a particular kind of panic that hits when everyone around you starts buying apartments, getting promoted, and posting engagement photos with golden retrievers in matching sweaters. I knew it well. It looked like 2am LinkedIn refreshes, the quiet sting of a friend's promotion announcement, the way my chest tightened every time someone posted from a city I had never been to. This piece is the long, ungraceful story of how I stopped measuring my life by other peoples calendars, and what I learned about being on time when nobody is actually keeping score.

Key Takeaways

• The feeling of being behind in life is a story you inherited from family, media, and the algorithm. It is not a fact about you.
• Comparing your unfinished insides to other peoples curated outsides is a guaranteed way to feel small and misread your own life.
• Milestones do not have to look like marriage, promotion, and a mortgage. They can look like a quieter morning or a habit you finally kept.
• Slowing down on purpose, even in small ways, will often quietly outrun chronic urgency.
• Being on time almost always just means being on someone elses time.

. . .

The First Time I Counted Everyone Elses Wins (And Lost)

It was a Tuesday in August, the kind of August where nothing happens and everything feels enormous anyway. I was 23, sitting on my parents floor in our apartment in Karachi, scrolling through LinkedIn at 2am because sleep felt boring and the internet felt urgent. Maya, a girl I had gone to school with, had just been promoted to Senior something at a company in San Francisco. Her post had eight hundred reactions. I felt the slow, uncomfortable squeeze of my chest doing math.

Three more friends had moved abroad. Two had bought apartments. One had quietly started a fintech startup and was raising a seed round. I, on the other hand, had spent the previous weekend learning how to make dal correctly and watching an extremely long documentary about Italian cheese. I closed the laptop. I opened it again. I closed it. I went to the kitchen and made tea I did not want.

It was the first time I really sat with the question of what it would mean to be behind. Not just busy, not just confused, but late. The whole feeling came with a strange certainty, as if the world were a train and I had missed it.

The worst part of feeling behind is how convincing it is.

. . .

Whose Timeline Was I Even On

I started keeping a small note on my phone called Things I Was Told I Had To Do. It was meant to be a joke. It became a mirror. By 22, the note said, you should have a job. By 25, savings. By 27, a partner. By 30, a house. By 32, kids, ideally two, ideally happy.

I had not written this list. I could not even remember a single moment when someone had handed it to me. It had simply arrived, the way fog arrives. From my mothers softly worried questions on phone calls. From the romantic comedies I grew up on. From the way every Pinterest board I had ever made was titled Future. From whatever the algorithm thought a girl my age was supposed to want.

The note did something useful, eventually. It made the timeline visible. And once a thing is visible, you can ask whether you actually agree with it.

I did not, mostly.

The first step out of the race is realizing you never signed up.

. . .

What Feeling Behind in Life in Your 20s Actually Looks Like

For me it looked like seven specific things, and I think a lot of women in my orbit will recognize all of them.

It looked like opening LinkedIn the way other people open Instagram. It looked like saying I am so good, busy busy at brunch when my actual week had been three breakdowns and one really nice walk. It looked like buying a Moleskine planner every January and not opening it past March. It looked like reading personal development books at the speed of someone fleeing something. It looked like quietly resenting friends when they shared good news, then being quietly furious at myself for that resentment.

It looked like dressing up and going to networking events I did not enjoy because someone, somewhere, said this was how careers were built. It looked like working through a Saturday for a job I did not love, just to have a story about how hard I worked.

It did not look like a person living a life. It looked like a person performing one.

A performance is exhausting in a way actual living is not.

. . .

The Slow, Boring Practice of Looking Up From the Race

The thing that finally broke the loop for me was not a big realization. It was a Saturday afternoon in a tiny cafe called Fabrica Coffee Roasters in Lisbon, sometime around the spring of 2024. I had ordered a flat white, opened a worn copy of Mary Oliver, and at one point I noticed I had been reading for two hours and had not once thought about what I should be doing instead. That was the first time in months I had felt like a person.

Things I started doing on purpose after that, in no particular order. I deleted LinkedIn from my phone for ninety days. I started cooking long, complicated dinners on weeknights, the kind that take two hours and dirty every pan. I let myself walk to the grocery store the long way. I started a Notes app folder called Real Things where I wrote one true sentence a day, even if it was something tiny like the cat on the corner has a torn ear.

I joined a slow run club in Karachi where the rule was that nobody was allowed to tell you their pace. I took a knife skills workshop on a whim because I had always wanted to dice an onion correctly. I started a habit of walking my parents through whatever I had cooked that week, just because they liked it. I bought a real teapot.

None of these were career moves. None of these were milestones. They were the small, ordinary acts of returning to my own life. If you want more on building this kind of practice, see Why I Think Getting a Little Lost Is the Whole Point and The Year I Stopped Trying to Be Interesting. For a research backed look at why our timelines feel so urgent, Oliver Burkemans Four Thousand Weeks is a quiet revelation.

Being on time means being on time for yourself, not for the algorithm.

. . .

What I Have Stopped Apologizing For

I no longer apologize for not having a five year plan. I have a season plan, sometimes a month plan, sometimes only a today plan. So far, this has not ruined my life.

I no longer apologize for the way my career has zigged. I worked at one tech company, left for content writing, came back to engineering, then settled into a hybrid role I half made up. There is no clean LinkedIn narrative. There is, however, a person who likes her work most days.

I no longer apologize for cooking elaborate dinners for myself on a Tuesday, taking the slow long flight rather than the cheap stopover, or going to weddings solo. I no longer apologize for not knowing what I want my Sunday evenings to look like in five years. I do, however, know what I want this Sunday evening to look like, which feels like a much more honest place to start.

. . .

A Few Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me Sooner

You are not late. You are also not early. You are simply here, which is the only place anyone has ever been on time for.

The people you secretly compare yourself to are also comparing themselves to someone else. Everyone is the protagonist of their own quiet panic, including the friend whose engagement post made you cry in a bathroom in 2023.

Most of the milestones you were sold are someone elses sales pitch. You are allowed to write your own. A milestone can be a habit kept, a friendship deepened, a meal cooked from scratch, a city walked slowly.

A small daily life, lived honestly, is not a smaller life. It is the actual one.

. . .

FAQ

What does feeling behind in life in your 20s usually mean?
It usually means you are comparing your unfinished, messy middle to other peoples curated outsides. The feeling is real. The timeline is mostly invented, stitched together from family expectations, romantic comedies, and a social media feed designed to keep you scrolling.

How do I stop comparing myself to others on Instagram and LinkedIn?
Start with the obvious. Mute, unfollow, or take a real break of thirty to ninety days. Then go a step further and replace the scrolling with one offline ritual you actually like, like a slow morning walk, a small cooking project, or a daily journaling practice. The point is not just less feed, it is more life.

Is it normal to feel behind at 25?
Wildly common, almost to the point of being a developmental milestone of its own. Most of the people I know hit some version of this between 24 and 28, often around the time their first round of friends starts marrying or moving abroad.

How do I figure out my own milestones?
Notice what you brag about when nobody is around. The small, useless things you are quietly proud of, like a recipe you nailed or a difficult conversation you finally had, are clues. Build outward from there.

What books or practices helped me the most?
Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman, the daily journaling habit from The Artists Way by Julia Cameron, and a long, slow weekly walk with no podcast in my ears. None of these are magic. All of them are quiet.

. . .

So, Are You Behind?

Probably not. You are probably just tired, slightly online, and surrounded by other peoples best three percent. If this piece resonated, follow along on Info Planet for the rest of my slow living and self discovery series. And tell me in the comments below, what is one thing you have stopped apologizing for? Blogger readers, I read every comment, usually with a cup of overly milky tea in my hand.