Why You Feel Behind

You see someone your age closing a huge deal. Another person just hit 100K followers. Your friend bought a house. Someone else is traveling the world while their business runs itself.

And that feeling hits. That specific, gut-level sensation that you're falling behind.

But here's the question: behind what, exactly?

Behind their salary? Behind their relationship status? Behind their Instagram aesthetic? You're measuring your progress on a scoreboard you didn't create, tracking a game you never agreed to play.

And that's the whole problem.

Think about it. Why does seeing someone else's success make you feel like a failure?

You didn't actually fail at anything. You're just unconsciously using their milestones as your measurement system. Their promotion becomes proof you're stagnant. Their relationship becomes evidence you're alone. Their success becomes your failure.

But you didn't wake up one day and decide "I want exactly what that person has." You just saw it, felt the comparison, and suddenly their scoreboard became yours.

This is the trap. We spend our entire lives being measured externally. Grades in school. Scores in sports. Likes on social media. Salary at work. We're so conditioned to external validation that we never learn to measure ourselves any other way.

So we default to the only system we know: comparing ourselves to everyone around us.

Here's what most people don't realize: there are two completely different ways to measure your life.

External scorekeeping is everything visible and comparable. Your salary. Your title. Your followers. Your relationship status. The size of your apartment. The places you've traveled. The things you own.

These metrics are clean. Easy to compare. Easy to rank. And they make you miserable.

Because external metrics are infinite. There's always someone with more money, a better title, a bigger audience, a more impressive life. You can never win because the finish line keeps moving. And even when you do hit a milestone, the satisfaction lasts about five minutes before you notice someone else who's further ahead.

Internal scorekeeping is completely different. It's based on questions only you can answer:

Am I learning skills that matter to me? Am I becoming more capable than I was last year? Do I understand myself better? Am I building something I actually care about? Am I living according to my values, or someone else's?

These questions don't have clean answers. You can't compare them. You can't rank them. And that's exactly why they matter.

A lot of people who seem “ahead” are completely lost.

They have the job, but they hate what they do. They have the relationship, but they're not sure why they're in it. They have the money, but no idea what they actually want. They hit all the milestones society told them to chase, and now they're standing at the finish line wondering why it doesn't feel like winning.

I know people who look incredibly successful on paper. Big salary, impressive title, nice apartment. And they're miserable. Because they spent so long chasing external metrics that they never figured out what they actually valued. They won a game they never wanted to play.

Meanwhile, I know people who look "behind" by conventional standards. No fancy job. No impressive title. Probably can't afford the nice apartment. But they're learning every day. They're building skills. They're figuring out who they are and what they want. They're playing their own game.

Who's actually ahead? The person with the better resume or the person with more self-knowledge?

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If you measure yourself externally, you'll always feel behind because there's always someone ahead. Always someone with more, better, bigger, faster.

But the moment you shift to internal measurement, the whole concept of "behind" stops making sense. Because you're not racing anyone. You're not comparing. You're just asking: am I growing? Am I learning? Am I becoming who I want to be?

Those questions don't have a timeline. There's no "should be here by 25" or "should have this by 30." There's just: am I moving forward by my own definition of forward?

And suddenly, other people's success doesn't threaten you anymore. Good for them. They're playing their game. You're playing yours.

The People Who Never Feel Behind

You know who doesn't feel behind? People who are too busy building their own thing to notice what everyone else is doing.

They're not "ahead" by conventional metrics. They're just playing a completely different game. They defined success on their own terms, and now they're measuring themselves against that definition instead of someone else's highlight reel.

They're learning skills nobody else values yet. They're building something that doesn't fit any existing category. They're optimizing for internal growth instead of external validation.

And because of that, they don't feel behind, they stopped running the race.

You feel behind because you're measuring yourself wrong. You're using someone else's scoreboard to judge your progress, and it's making you miserable.

So stop. Define success for yourself. What actually matters to you? Not what should matter, not what looks impressive, not what other people value. What do YOU value?

Then measure yourself against that. Are you learning? Are you growing? Are you building the life you actually want, not the one you think you're supposed to want?

Once you shift from external to internal measurement, the feeling of being behind disappears.

You're not behind. You're just playing a different game. And the moment you realize that, you stop losing.

See you on the next stair,
Alastair