Do you feel like you’re where you should be? You know, in life? Do you feel like you’re on track at work? Is your relationship status 100% smug? Have you actually managed to get a foot on the property ladder? In short – have you reached all the milestones you think you should have?
If you answered ‘yes’ to all of those questions - good for you. If, however, you answered ‘no’ – welcome to my world.
There’s an episode of SATC (yes I’m about to quote SATC, deal with it!), where Carrie says: 'In New York, they say you're always looking for a job, a boyfriend or an apartment. So, let's say you have two out of three and they're fabulous. Why do we let the thing we don't have affect how we feel about all the things we do have?'
The first time I heard that line, I skipped back to hear it again. And then again one more time just to make sure I hadn’t imagined it because it felt like someone had crept into my head, stolen all my deepest anxieties, and packaged them up into a snappy primetime TV-worthy soundbite.
At the time I was in my late 20s, and my life felt far from on-track. Like reeaaalllly far from on-track. While my friends were all building careers, living in super-fun house shares, and starting to settle down into serious relationships, I was back living at home with my parent’s, my career as a writer was stalling (or at least not progressing how I wanted it to), and my love life was a toxic Groundhog Day of ill-advised liaisons with the same non-committal losers.
Every night just before I fell asleep, and every morning just as I gained consciousness, the same thoughts popped into my head: 'How did I end up here? This isn’t where I’m meant to be at this stage in my life. Everything has gone horribly wrong. I’ve fucked it all up.' I hadn’t reached any of the milestones society was telling me I should have, and it was making me feel like an epic failure.
I’m now 34, and really and truly, life is good. I own a flat (which is basically a miracle, I know!) and my career’s going well - so that’s two out of three major life milestones reached. So… I should be happy, right? But I’m not. That voice, you know, that little nagging voice that tells you you’re not where you should be? Well, it’s still there. Because although I always assumed I’d have a family of my own by now (or, at the very least, be in a serious relationship), my love life is still an unmitigated disaster. It doesn’t matter that I’m on the property ladder or have a great job – I still haven't succeeded at life.
So where do these milestones that are making us all feel so crap come from? I asked psychologist Emma Kenny. 'From day one in the UK, we are brought up with a future-focused ideal. We are measured developmentally as babies, educationally as children and young people, socially by our peers and so on and so forth,' she told me. 'This trajectory makes us believe that the suggested route our parents, grandparents and general society have been travelling along is the one we too should explore.'
To make matters worse, when you’re a kid, reaching these developmental markers is all so easy; your whole life is structured in such a way that you hit all the major milestones – starting school, doing your GCSEs and A-levels, going to university – at the same time as your peers, by default. But when you leave school or university, it all becomes a lot more complicated. Suddenly you have multiple life goals to complete, and there’s no clear path to achieving them. Is it any surprise so many of us begin to feel like failures?
Talking to friends, I’ve realised I’m far from alone in feeling under pressure to tick off these major life achievements by a certain age – even though we all acknowledge that life just doesn’t work like that. But although our obsession with milestones is a mental thing, it’s not all in our heads. As a society, we’ve seen monumental shifts in how we live over the past few decades, and these shifts have moved the goalposts of achievement. When I was born, in 1983, the average age a woman got married in the UK was 27.2. It’s now 34.3. However, while my sane brain knows that my situation – a 30-something single woman living in London – isn’t a massive personal failing on my part, the side of my brain which was programmed from a young age to believe that I should be settled down with a family of my own by now often wins out.
According to Kenny, this is to be expected. 'The social conditioning of perceived achievement has taken root throughout our lives'. She went on to explain that 'most of us have grown up being told, "Do well at school, get a great job, meet a fab partner, buy a house, go on lovely holidays, have kids etc.".'
So, what can we do about it?
'Breaking free from these powerful and often unrealistic expectations takes time and involves dropping the guilt and readjusting your world view,' Emma told me. 'Instead of focusing on what others expect of you, you need to start a dialogue with yourself about what YOU truly want. Basing your dream, in reality, is really healthy and means you can concentrate on what you really wish to create in your world.' That is, in my opinion, pretty sound advice.
In an age where we're all so preoccupied with scrolling through other people's feeds and comparing our life to theirs, maybe it's time to have a good old look at our own lives and, instead of finding that they fall short of the expectations of others, thinking about what success would look like on our own terms.
I’ll give it a go if you will…
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.