Nobody Has It ‘All’ Figured Out; So Why Doesn’t It Look That Way?
By Shreya Madhwal, Intern
In a group chat filled with internship offers and a friend’s engagement party, a nagging feeling creeps in. You should have figured things out by now. Whether you’re a college student unsure about your future, a recent grad scrolling job boards at 1 a.m., a professional feeling stuck, or someone unemployed watching others move forward, that feeling is the same. Almost everyone in their twenties is grappling with it, yet we all assume we’re alone. What if the timeline we think we’re racing against isn’t even real?
Psychologist Bernice Neugarten had a name for the invisible pressure driving this feeling: the social clock. It’s the internalized, culturally inherited sense of when things are supposed to happen; when you should graduate, land the job, buy the house, get married, have it “figured out.” That clock doesn’t check whether you’re a student, a graduate, gainfully employed, between jobs, or rethinking your entire path; it runs the same regardless, which is exactly why the feeling of falling behind touches every version of the twenties, not just one. Neugarten’s research found that people who feel “off-time,” ahead or behind this unspoken schedule, experience real psychological distress, even when nothing is objectively wrong with their lives. The unsettling twist is that the clock isn’t measuring anything real. It’s not biology. It’s not law. It’s a social agreement so old and so widely shared that it starts to feel like gravity, a fixed law of the universe, when it’s really more like fashion: constructed, arbitrary, and quietly rewritten by every generation that comes after it.
This is where developmental psychologist Jeffrey Arnett’s theory of emerging adulthood becomes almost a relief to read. Arnett argued that the twenties are not simply “early adulthood” running late, they’re a distinct developmental stage of their own, defined by identity exploration, instability, self-focus, and a persistent feeling of being in-between. In other words, the confusion isn’t a bug in your twenties. It’s the entire point of them. Compare that to previous generations, who often married, settled into careers, and bought homes years earlier, and it becomes clear that today’s twenty-somethings aren’t failing to keep pace with an old timeline; they’re living inside a fundamentally different one, while still emotionally graded on the old scale.
Then there’s the psychological mechanism that turns this quiet unease into a daily ache: social comparison theory, first proposed by Leon Festinger. Festinger observed that in the absence of objective ways to measure our own progress; and “am I doing life right?” has no objective answer, the mind instinctively reaches for other people as a measuring stick. This wouldn’t be so dangerous if we compared ourselves to a realistic cross-section of humanity. But we don’t. We compare ourselves to a heavily curated reference group, amplified endlessly by social media, where every peer appears to be simultaneously getting promoted, getting engaged, getting into their dream program, or launching a business; regardless of whether you’re comparing from a lecture hall, a cubicle, or your childhood bedroom while job hunting.
Sociologist Erving Goffman described human life as a kind of performance, split between a polished “front stage” we present to the world and a messy “backstage” where the real, unedited struggle happens. The cruel math of the comparison trap is this: you are constantly comparing your own backstage (self-doubt, false starts, 2 a.m. spirals) to everyone else’s front stage.
There’s one more piece to this puzzle, and it might be the most human one. Psychologist Dan McAdams’ theory of narrative identity suggests that we don’t just live our lives, we narrate them constantly, weaving events into a story with a shape, a pace, and an expected arc. When life doesn’t hit its “chapters” on schedule, it doesn’t just feel inconvenient. It feels like the story itself is broken, which is a far more existential kind of discomfort than simply being unhappy with a job, a relationship status, a degree still unfinished, or an offer letter that hasn’t arrived yet.
Put all of this together, and the feeling of being “behind” starts to look less like a personal failure and more like a shared psychological illusion; built from an outdated social clock, a mismatched developmental stage, a rigged comparison game, and a very human need for our lives to make narrative sense. None of that makes the feeling any less real at the moment. But it does mean the question isn’t “why am I so behind?” It’s “behind whom, exactly; and according to what clock?”
If that subtle alarm has transformed into a roaring call that drowns out the background noise; if you’re feeling overwhelmed by constant anxiety, self-doubt, or a nagging sense that life is slipping away while you’re busy measuring it; it’s time to dive into a conversation! This isn’t a sign that something’s wrong with you; it’s an opportunity to explore and unravel the tangled web of expectations versus your true self, and having the right guide makes all the difference. Sometimes, the most thrilling thing you can do in your twenties isn’t to play catch-up; it’s to challenge the very idea of the race itself! Why not question whether that race ever existed? Embrace the excitement of discovery and redefine what success means for you!
