On ‘wasting’ youth

The age of social media seems to birth and nurture a phenomenon of constant social comparison. Measuring oneself against an external yardstick has never not been a staple of society. We, just like previous generations, are held hostage by an unbendable urge to live up to certain standards and earn validation from others. Unfortunately, with the ever growing access to people’s private lives through platforms that conveniently allow for selective depictions of oneself, the pressure is raised tenfolds. Somehow we are striving not only to ‘make it’, but also to do so before someone else could. The publicness and self-embellishment propelled by social media yield a range of detriments to our psychology (I could readily name a few emotions I often experience while consuming media: anxiety, frustration, envy, stress). But then for the most part I would be able to resist the instinct to take what I see on social media at face value or fall prey to the psychological misstep triggered by the contents I find here. It does take practice to realize that, of course, there is always a layer of filtering and editing when we see stuff shared online, no matter how genuine it’s made to appear – but it’s doable. However, it takes a whole different kind of effort when I have to deal with real-life observations and experiences. It becomes all the more real when I see or hear someone in real life highlight an adequacy that I have, either intentionally or inadvertently. Sometimes there is no ill will in someone showing concern or giving me feedback, but my comparison-wired brain can’t help but feel like the interaction is to lay bare my defects and relative worthlessness. This effect gets to me even when people are going about their lives without interacting with me at all – their mere presence just implies something inferior about me.

I wrote the opening paragraph above when I was at a particularly low point a couple of months back, when I felt that wherever I looked, I was reminded of how “behind” I was falling in life. And it wasn’t even the shallow kind of feeling (the social media-powered temptation to envy materialistic show-off and superficial rewards). I genuinely experienced panic and shame for lacking practical independence as a 20-something, for being too sheltered and complacent in my own privileges while delaying the “adulting” process which should have begun years before. At that point, I was feeling trapped and helpless, but I couldn’t quite articulate these emotions to others because I feared coming off as having too much self-pity even when I was barely doing anything. I left this blog post as an incomplete draft also because it felt wrong to publicly “whine” while I was in my position. Gradually by my self, I had to learn to differentiate the imagined burden of the situation from the reality of it – that it was not that big of a deal if I was dawdling around when everything seemed to move and progress fast around me, that the pressure to keep up was inflated in my mind due to the tendency to weave it with my inherent worth. I told myself that how fast I was going in life wasn’t really up to anyone, even myself, to use against me. It’s a made up notion, and at this point it was hurting more than not.

For the past months, thoughts of how I’m ‘wasting’ my youth have plagued my mind. For a while, my health was showing noticeable signs of deterioration and though it was nothing particularly alarming, my mental wellbeing also suffered because of my physical state. ‘Youth’ also happens to be tied disproportionately to physical health and beauty, so one could see why my doubts about my ‘wasting’ youth were consistently snowballing. I have been stressed about various aspects of my life, and at the same time too drained to even work on addressing them. There was an inexplicable inhibition that constantly intercepted my attempts to get myself in the circumstances which I know would benefit me mentally, professionally, and socially. During this period, I felt an overwhelming stagnation and even signs of my progressing backwards at times. My situation wasn’t evident to only me, as many people around me also hinted that something needed to change. These comments were always well-intentioned, and I agreed with them entirely. However, a sad by-product of hearing someone else state the truth is that it drills in your mind another (imagined) message: that you are not doing enough for yourself to get away from the problems if others begin to signal them to you.

Now I have removed some of these concerns from my life in an act of physically distancing myself. Things have been looking up more recently and I am now regaining momentum to work on getting my life in better shape. Upon turning 26 a few weeks ago, I had a small panic moment of realizing that the clock continues to tick down to my 30-year-old mark, but at the same time the pressure to make something out of the four years ahead felt less hurried, less formidable. The idea that my 20s ought to be spent a certain way for it to be worthy, for me to be worthy, is a proven scam, at least by my reasoning. When I take on the (initially) uncomfortable, cheesy task of actually writing down what I appreciate about where I am at in life (gratitude journaling is the ‘technical’ term), I realize that my “youth” has been exactly how it should be, no more, no less. As long as I have experienced a myriad of great moments being with myself, my friends and loved ones, and my work and contributions, the extra layers of merits and “success” as determined by society are dispensable bonuses at best and toxic distractions for my mental wellbeing at worst. The metaphor of a ticking clock following our every step in life and rushing us to some far-flung finish line now turns into a strange self-torture device that we compulsively use to hurt ourselves and society altogether. I am merely echoing what a lot of others have stated, especially in this era of uncertain social and economic fluctuations, and amidst media trends like the “quiet quitting” and “slow life” movements. My own experience helps me arrive at a more or less similar conclusion about the meaningless race to status and success. We could all give a little more respect to ourselves by not succumbing blindly to the nonsensical notions that we are tightly bound to a prefixed timeline in life to prove ourselves, and that youth is the only limited period where we have to dedicate all our efforts to the task.