you are not behind in life

you haven’t even fully lived yet.

I'm tired of being fed this idea that I’m behind in life. How can I be behind in a life that I just started living? You don’t need to be a millionaire by tomorrow, you don’t need to be productive every second of every day, and you don’t need to be married with kids by tomorrow. Give yourself a break.  When everyone’s lives are published online, and only the best parts of that, it’s evident that you start to feel behind.  When people showing off their accomplishments is all you consume, you begin to feel like you have nothing to show. We tend to forget that we all have entirely different life paths. Some people only realise this later in their lives because they’re constantly running after a path never meant for them. In this article, I’ll discuss the idea of “being behind in life” and hopefully somewhat debunk it concerning work and ‘hustle’ culture, ‘traditional’ culture, and more.

Think back to your grandparents’ generation; what was the expectation of a good or ideal life? A decent education, a good job, and, if you were a woman, a loving (probably sexist) husband and kids by the age of 24. After children, you were confined to your own walls as you became the poster housewife. Women were never seen as capable of simultaneously managing a job and their lives—and to some, we still aren’t. With the rise of feminism, women were finally given some sense of equality to their male counterparts, and with that came a sense of newly found freedom. We were no longer tied down to our houses and, even better, the sayings and demands of our husbands. Although it took time, women globally could finally do what theywanted without a man nagging behind them. I’ll admit that it’s still something we suffer with; there’s no way that I can sit here and say that we live in a completely equal society where women don’t face any prejudice from men, but it is better than in the past.

don’t worry darling (2022)

And then comes the ‘girl boss’ movement. A movement that aimed quite literally to empower women to become their own bosses. It was the counterpart to the male ‘hustle’ culture, and I blame both movements for being the tip of the iceberg in the conversation of feeling behind. During this era, everybody and their mother was trying to be a ‘girl boss’, whether that meant starting a business, fighting to be promoted, etc. None of these things are inherently bad, but the issue is that it made everyone believe that that was their one purpose in life. Because of movements of this nature, our society has become more focused on success than satisfaction. Productivity and competition became more important than peace and literally being human.

Nowadays, with social media, we see these two trends in the past come to light differently. There’s a rise in ‘trad wives’ (traditional, 1950s-type of life) and a regurgitated hustle culture. I emphasise again that there's nothing inherently bad with any of these lifestyles, but at the end of the day, they’re still a part of the problem. At its extreme, the ‘trad wife’ aesthetic is even worse than what it inspires itself from where – to put it lightly – some women want to become puppets for their husbands, essentially. It brings to light this rise in the loss of independence that women had once fought for.

nara smith (making something from scratch)

Nara Smith is a 22-year-old influencer who I'm sure you have at least seen videos of lately. Every time I stumble across one of her “my husband wanted XYZ, so I made it from scratch” videos, I laugh because it’s quite funny how dedicated she is (I could never). Some people think she’s lying; others truly believe she lives that life daily. Either way, she works hard to keep up that image. But when I read the comments on her videos, people are shocked that she is a 22-year-old married mother of three, and they feel behind in their lives. Now, I mean absolutely no offence to Nara or anyone else who is a young mother, but I could not be a mother at this age. I’m two years younger than Nara, and although my ‘baby fever’ is higher than ever some weeks, I could genuinely not be a mother right now. Not because I’m not ready or can’t sustain myself, but because I haven’t even lived my life yet.  Just because another woman has found her path in life, and it happens to be that, it doesn’t mean your life needs to be identical. I’d argue this aligns with our society's growing lack of identity, and we tend to leech onto other people’s lives online to dictate our own.

The people you see on Instagram telling you that they turned their lives around in under 6 months are scammers. They sell you this idea that you are so behind in life and that they made six figures in a month while you were doing nothing with your life. All they're doing is tearing your mental health apart to a point where you feel worthless and helpless and buy into their digital marketing programmes. I don’t know how often I have to say this, but social media is fake. These people are fake. They probably don’t know what they're doing with their lives either. Algorithms and society will constantly try to tell you what your success should look like, and it's easy to get influenced if you don’t actually know what it's meant to look like.

photo credits unknown

And finally, another element that has made me feel extremely behind in life, especially in relation to my spirituality and the experiences that I've had, is the aestheticisation of spiritual enlightenment. In the same way the ‘hustle culture and wanna-be Andrew Tate’ influencers attempt to sell you products by telling you you are behind in life, these spiritual influencers made me feel like I was nowhere in life. They make it look easy to gain all this knowledge about your emotions and the world and never really talk about the bad part of it. They never talk about how everything you’ve worked for spirituality can fall apart, but when they do, they never really acknowledge that as a natural part of the process. We should genuinely take everything from these influencers with a grain of salt because, again, half of the things meant to ‘enlighten’ us haven’t even happened to us yet.

I think most of my readers are about the same age as me, so I know many of us feel this way. But although easier said than done, do whatever you want. At the time of writing this, I’m 20 years old, meaning that I have only lived about 10 years that I actually remember, if not less. 10 YEARS. That might seem like a lot, but it’s nothing because those 10 years were just me trying to find myself and preparing myself for the world. Now, at 20, I'm finally going into it, and literally having grown men on Instagram telling me that I need to be a 6-figure business owner by tomorrow night, which is crazy.

I feel like this rant is coming from wrapping up a month of working in a field where getting a job is so difficult and competitive. When I first began speaking to my co-workers about their experiences, I’d expect them to tell me a long list of things they’ve done in the past to get them where they are now, but that was rarely the case. Most of the advice I ever got was not to fully enter the workplace until I've lived a little.  But this also comes from a place of privilege where we can decide what we want to do. Not everyone can afford that. I wish I could drop everything and travel for a month, and I probably could if I planned hard enough, but I also need to remind myself that not everyone can do that. Anyway, I think we should all strive to live like 50-year-old black actresses – stress-free, doing our own thing, happy and at peace (yes, just like Tracee Ellis Ross).

thank you for reading !