The Unwritten Deadline: Why Being 25 Feels Like a Race

There is a strange kind of pressure that comes with being in your twenties. You open social media and see someone your age celebrating a promotion, starting a business, traveling abroad, or buying a house. You may be happy for a moment, but then look at yourself and wonder where you are falling short and whether you should be doing more. In reality, nothing is wrong. You are learning new skills, figuring out your future, but suddenly your own efforts do not feel like enough. Nobody told you that life was a competition; still, somewhere along the way, because of society or expectations, you started running. A 2017 study published in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking examined the relationship between Facebook use, social comparison, and psychological well-being among 1,104 undergraduate students. The researchers found that Facebook use was associated with greater social comparison. The study also linked social comparison with lower self-esteem and poorer mental health indicators. Beyond social media, expectations about the twenties can contribute to the feeling that there is a timeline for success. Under this pressure, ordinary small successes may feel like failures, leading to low self-esteem and comparisons with others' success. The difficult part is not necessarily being unsuccessful. It is believing that your progress matters less because somebody else's progress looks more impressive. You begin measuring your life against timelines you never created. Getting a job by a certain age, earning a particular salary, and achieving independence become invisible deadlines. Sometimes, progress is simply the work being done away from the spotlight. Rather than asking whether life looks successful enough compared with everyone else’s, a more useful question may be whether the choices being made today are helping build the life one genuinely wants.