At some point, most of us are given an idea of what a successful life is supposed to look like.
You go to college or university, get your degree, graduate before 25, find a stable job, start making decent money, move out, eventually buy a house, stay in shape, dress well, find a partner and somehow become a fully functioning adult while you're still young enough to feel like you have plenty of time left.
None of these things are inherently bad.
Most of them are perfectly reasonable things to want.
Milestones We Are Taught to Chase
The strange part is how easily they stop being things we simply want and become things we feel we are supposed to have, often by a certain age, and how quickly someone else's progress can make us question our own.
Education is one of the first places where this happens.
For a lot of young people, there is an unspoken timeline attached to getting a degree: graduate high school, go to college or university, finish around 22 or 23, and have a career underway before 25.
A 2024 study examining educational expectations and bachelor's-degree completion found that educational expectations are strongly connected to later degree attainment, while also highlighting differences based on factors including parental education.
The idea that your education should be completed within a particular window can become so normalized that taking longer, changing programs, returning to school later or choosing a different path can feel like falling behind, even when there is nothing objectively wrong with the timeline you are on.
That feeling can be even more complicated when you're the first person in your family to get that education.
Being first-generation can come with enormous pride, but it can also come with an expectation that your education is supposed to change everything. You aren't just getting a degree because you want one.
When Achievement Becomes Proof
You might be doing it because your parents never had the opportunity, because your family sacrificed to get you there, or because education was presented as the way you would build a better life.
Recent research on first-generation university students has found that family expectations and the desire to break intergenerational patterns can be important motivations for pursuing higher education, while other research has documented the complicated feelings that can come with becoming more educationally or financially successful than the family you came from.
That creates a strange responsibility around achievement.
You can want to make more money than your parents did, and there is nothing wrong with that.
You can want to become the first person in your family to graduate, get a professional job or move into a different socioeconomic position.
But sometimes “doing better” becomes more than an aspiration.
It becomes something you feel you owe people.
Your degree starts to represent your family's sacrifices.
Your career becomes proof that the opportunities they didn't have were worth fighting to give you.
Your income becomes evidence that you made it somewhere they couldn't.
Suddenly, succeeding isn't only about what you want for your own life. It becomes about proving that the life you came from doesn't have to be the life you end up with.
And then you graduate, and the finish line moves.
Now you need the job. Not just any job, but a stable career that makes the degree feel worth it.
You need to make more than minimum wage.
You need savings.
You need to become independent.
Eventually, you're supposed to buy a home.
The problem is that the cultural timeline hasn't necessarily caught up with reality.
Statistics Canada reported in 2024 that rising home prices, rental costs and borrowing costs were creating significant financial and housing pressures for younger Canadians, with many reconsidering their plans to buy.
Yet even when people understand that homeownership has become more difficult, the milestone still carries enormous cultural weight.
Someone your age buying a house can make you feel behind even when you know logically that the circumstances aren't comparable.
The same thing happens with almost everything else.
You are supposed to be physically fit, so you go to the gym.
You are supposed to eat well, so you change your diet.
You are supposed to dress well, so you buy the clothes everyone seems to be wearing.
You are supposed to look feminine enough or masculine enough, successful enough or put together enough.
You are supposed to travel, have a relationship, have friends, have hobbies and somehow maintain all of it while also advancing your career.
Eventually, life starts to feel less like something you're living and more like something you're trying to successfully demonstrate.
Social media makes that feeling almost impossible to escape because we no longer compare ourselves only with the people we know.
We compare ourselves with everyone.
Comparison Has No Finish Line
Someone graduates. Someone gets promoted. Someone buys a house. Someone gets engaged. Someone loses weight. Someone buys a new car, has the perfect apartment, is wearing something you can't afford.
There will always be someone who appears to have the career, the relationship, the body and the lifestyle you've been trying to build for years.
You can be perfectly happy with your life in the morning and spend ten minutes scrolling in the afternoon wondering why you don't have more.
Research increasingly supports the idea that social comparison on social media can have real psychological consequences.
A 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis examining 83 studies and more than 55,000 participants found significant associations between social comparison on social media and body-image concerns, eating-disorder symptoms and lower positive body image.
That doesn't mean every person who uses Instagram or TikTok is being harmed by comparison, but it does show that constantly evaluating ourselves against what other people present online is not necessarily as harmless as we might think.
The most unsettling part is that we can start wanting things simply because we've seen someone else have them.
You didn't necessarily think you needed the apartment until you saw theirs.
You weren't unhappy with your clothes until someone else's wardrobe became your new reference point.
You weren't worried about travelling enough until you saw someone taking their fourth trip of the year.
We see more, so we want more. And because there is always someone with more, there is no obvious point at which we are supposed to stop.
That might explain why achievement can feel strangely empty once we actually get there.
We spend years imagining that the degree, the job, the promotion, the salary, the house, the relationship or the body will finally make us feel like we've arrived.
Then we achieve it, celebrate it, post about it, receive congratulations and wake up the next morning to the same person staring back at us in the mirror.
When Success Stops Feeling New
The achievement mattered, but the feeling didn't necessarily stay.
Psychologists have studied this through the concept of hedonic adaptation, the tendency for people to become accustomed to changes in their circumstances so that the emotional effect of a positive event can diminish over time.
That doesn't mean achievements don't make us happy or that everything eventually becomes meaningless. It means the excitement of getting what we wanted can become normal much faster than we expected.
The promotion becomes the job. The new apartment becomes home. The degree becomes a credential. The expensive purchase becomes something you barely notice after a while.
And when the feeling disappears, we often assume the answer is to achieve something else.
Maybe the next degree will do it. The next promotion. More money. A better body. A bigger house. A nicer wardrobe. A more exciting relationship. Another vacation. We keep moving because we think the next accomplishment will finally produce the feeling we were looking for in the first place. But if what we're really looking for is validation, security, belonging or proof that we're enough, there is always going to be another achievement that promises to provide it.
This is where the silent competition becomes so exhausting.
Nobody has officially asked us to compete. Our friends aren't necessarily trying to beat us.
The person on Instagram probably doesn't know we exist.
Yet we can still spend years measuring ourselves against people who don't even know they're being used as a measurement.
We compare our education, our income, our appearance, our relationships and our lifestyles, then wonder why our own accomplishments never seem to feel quite big enough.
But there is something else we can forget when we're so focused on what we haven't done yet: we've already done things.
Being in progress doesn't mean you've failed. It means you're in progress.
Being Unfinished Isn't Failure
I've had to remind myself of that recently. Since early August, I've been looking for work. I've applied, followed up, reached out to people and tried to figure out where I'm supposed to go next. And despite having already held multiple positions and having two degrees I'm still struggling to find the next opportunity. Being a first-generation student adds another layer to that feeling because there is a part of me that wants to believe that after everything it took to get here, I should already have the stable career that was supposed to come next.
But I don't.
And that doesn't erase what I have accomplished.
Instead of letting the uncertainty mean that I wasn't doing anything, I opened Leshai. I wanted something to work toward while I searched for work.
I wanted to keep writing, keep creating, keep learning and keep building something even when it wasn't currently providing me with an income.
It doesn't replace the job I'm looking for, and I'm not going to pretend that unpaid work magically makes financial stress disappear. But it is still something I chose to create. It is still evidence that I'm moving forward, even while another part of my life is uncertain.
I think we need to give ourselves more credit for that.
Maybe you're halfway through your degree. Maybe you've changed programs three times. Maybe you graduated and still haven't found the job you imagined you'd have by now. Maybe you're working a job that has nothing to do with what you studied.
Maybe you're saving for a house and feel like everyone else got there before you. Maybe you're living with your parents longer than you expected. Maybe you've gained weight, lost weight, stopped going to the gym, started again, or simply don't have the energy to optimize every part of yourself right now.
That doesn't mean you're behind.
Anything that is still in progress is, by definition, still in progress. It hasn't failed simply because it isn't finished yet.
There is a difference between recognizing that you want more from your life and deciding that what you have already done doesn't count until you reach the next milestone.
One allows you to be ambitious.
The other makes every achievement temporary.
So maybe ambition isn't the problem.
What Do You Really Want?
Maybe wanting a house, a career, a degree, financial stability, a healthy body or a beautiful wardrobe isn't the problem either.
The more uncomfortable question is whether we still want those things when nobody is watching.
Would you still want the degree if nobody was impressed by it?
Would you still want the career if you couldn't tell anyone your salary?
Would you still want the house if nobody knew you owned it?
Would you still buy the clothes if there was no Instagram, no compliment and no one to notice?
Would you still want to look a certain way if you weren't comparing yourself to anyone else?
Maybe the answer is yes. Maybe those things genuinely belong to you. But maybe some of them don't.
Because there is a difference between building a life you actually want and collecting evidence that you are doing well. There is a difference between wanting success and wanting to be seen as successful. There is a difference between improving yourself and constantly trying to prove that you're not falling behind.
So before we decide that we need the next achievement, the next purchase, the next milestone or the next version of ourselves, maybe we should ask a more uncomfortable question: What are you trying to prove?
To your parents? To your friends? To the people you grew up with? To the people watching your life online? Or to yourself?
And if you finally prove it, what happens then?
Maybe the goal isn't to stop wanting more. Maybe it is to recognize what you've already done, understand why you want what comes next, and remember that being unfinished is not the same thing as being unsuccessful.