Social media comes with so much pressure in life, ignore

I was listening to, well, eavesdropping is more accurate, to a conversation between two colleagues.

I missed the context, but the guy seemed to worry that with a few months shy of his 27th birthday, “he is too old” and “with nothing to show for his life”.

I could sense that even though he was attempting to make light of the matter, he was deeply worried about his career and future prospects.

Suddenly, he turned to me.

“Daisy, how old are you, if you don’t mind me asking?”

On impulse, I wanted to tell him. My age is not exactly a secret. But on second thought, and realising that telling him my age would have made him feel worse than he was, I deflected the conversation. "What is wrong with your age? Why do you want to know my age?” I asked him, obviously in jest, to put him at ease.

“I feel old. I am behind my classmates by about two years. After uni, most of them started building their careers immediately, while I took a two-year break to travel. So, now they have made progress, while I am just starting out. I am not on par with them when it comes to career attainment. And now I feel like I will not achieve some of the goals I had set to achieve before I turn 30,” he said.

I had many things to say to him, but right at that moment, I knew I needed to order my words. One of the things that became clear was he was allowing comparison to steal his joy.

Plan and capacity

While there is nothing wrong with setting that big and audacious goal for yourself, whether or not you achieve that goal depends so much on how well you do the task right in front of you. It is the everyday step-by-step that will get you there.

So in other words, achieving the target you have set for yourself when you are 30 starts with doing well in your immediate assignment – be it an exam, attending to your next patient, writing that first draft of a short film you want to shoot…

This is what I told my colleague, to remind him that worrying, he will not achieve his goal when he gets to 30 as being two years behind his classmates will not change anything.

“There is a difference. I feel like if I had not wasted the two years, I would be where my classmates are, somewhere with my teeth deep into my career, not just starting out and way behind schedule,” he said.

His genuine worry reminded me of the world of Instagram and Snapchat and Tiktok, which comes with so much pressure to make it in life, or at least look like you are making it.

From your friend’s post about a promotion, to your college classmate’s recent reel about their tour of the Island of Mortar, to that other friend who just got married, it is difficult to term it easy to resist the temptation to compare yourself with your age-mates, mark your own achievements against theirs and sulk at how much you “fall below par”.

I was going to say you shouldn’t worry too much because people hardly post their failures so the fact that everything about them is a success doesn’t mean that they have not had low points. But that is a broken record.

Unique journey

However, what if I told you, like I told my colleague, the course of your life is unique? This is why we get to certain milestones ahead of others or before others, what really counts is you are faithful to your calling in life, and the path you were born to walk.

“You seem to think the two years you spent travelling were a waste?” I posed, obviously sounding like a therapist.

“Yes, because then my classmates were progressing with their careers, while I was marking time. And now I have to play catch up,” he said

I took time to remind him that he gained invaluable transferable skills through his travels. Some people travel later in life, others early in life, others only get to travel because of work, and others never travel at all. But it was hard work to convince him to not compare his career achievements with that of his classmates.

I don’t have a magic pill that instantly keeps people from comparing themselves to others. But perhaps a good place to end this is by saying Colonel Harland David Sanders founded Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) at 62.

The writer is the Research & Impact Editor, NMG; [email protected]