There was one time when my friends and I hanged out, and we played this game called "We're not really strangers", which basically is composed of a question on each card, designed to let people get to know each other a little bit better. So one of my question was about how I actually feel, and I said I'm kinda upset about starting my podcast too late and not being able to do a bunch of other stuff that I should have done by now.
To my surprise, all of my friends can strongly relate with me on the silent pressure that we should be someone and accomplish something great by now. Even the one that seemed to have it all. This made me question, the sense of always being late in life, where did it come from?
The earliest I can remember when I felt this sense of being late is when getting to know someone a bit younger than me and has managed to accomplish more than I have in all of my years living on earth. And it only gets more intense year by year, probably because the younger generation has early access to improved education and the vast resources on the internet, they seem to be able to do a lot more stuff very early in life, building a startup by age 15, becoming a global environmental advocate at the age of 8, finishing their master degree at age 20. I know I should be glad that everyone who comes after probably would have a better future, but to be vulnerably honest, it scares me sometimes to feel that everyone is moving at such a higher speed than I could keep up.
The more I think about this, the more this phenomenon feels like a shrunk version of how productivity, which literally measures how much we get done during a limited amount of time. And the same principle applies here, how much we have accomplished during our lifetime up untill this point. And you know how crazy people go about productivity. We are forever constantly trying to get more and more done in a day, while our 24-hour day is not getting any longer. Whenever someone manages to show us that they can accomplish way more than we could ever imagine, for good reasons, we feel guilt, anxiety and disappointment, all towards ourselves.
Another aspect that have to do with time, is that as a society, we seem to live by a certain timeline, which actually makes sense, since most of us spend the first 18 years of our lives the same way and die around the same age. There is a perception of being normal if your life achievements fit in this common timeline: graduating and having a well-paid job in your 20s, buying a house and having a family in your 30s, getting a mid-life crisis and a drinking problem in your 40s and so on. So on the on hand, when you manage to do all these things a bit earlier than this common timeline, you feel..."more exceptional". On the other hand, when you haven't done those things by a certain age, you receive implicit messages from your family, your society, your facebook ads, your youtube video recommendations that yOu ArE LaTe, a failure, an outcast for not being where everyone expects you to be.
And that also leads me to my next point, it's human nature to try to make sense of who you are by means of comparison. Sorry, that was such a clunkly sentence. Let me simplify. We define ourselves by how better or worse we are compared to others around us. If you are in a class full of grade A students, then you being the smart kid doesn't help you to find a unique sense of who you are. But if you are in a normal class, then it makes sense to think of yourself as a smart pant. We define our value in the context of others. It's like the paradox that all teenagers used to ponder, if everyone is unique then no one is unique.
At the surface it seems this way of navigating the world just makes sense, but at a closer look, you'll see its ugly heads and limbs. Especially when faced with a secret desire to start something new in your life, this feeling of lateness does more harm than good.
Remember the time when you felt it's too late for something and you decided there was no point in starting? Like a meeting with a friend or a side project? Feeling late in life does the exact same thing, instead of encouraging you to try things out, it tells the sweet word of procrastination in your ears. Except that it's not a casual meeting, but it's your life and the things you'd like to do with it. And think about it, the very meaning of late is "to after an expected, proper or usual time". It means the right time has passed, and there is nothing you can do about it. You're late. This heaviness adds up, if right off the bat you are already feeling like you're disappointing yourself by being late, then chances are that you are gonna try to procrastinate it to not disappoint yourself anymore. So instead of showing up, you're just gonna try to find excuses for not starting, on top of that "it's too late to start". Another problem with this statement is that it keeps you focused on the past. You can only know you are late when a certain time has passed by, right? But when you are buried too deep in this past, you can't see the way out. When you don't accept or notice where you currently are, it's hard to make a plan to get where you wanna be, it's like giving instructions to Google map but not allowing Google to read your GPS. You can't expect yourself to achieve shit if you haven't helped yourself clear out the challenges you are facing.
It took me so long to realize this, but being late doesn't matter if you don't even know where you want to go. Sometimes we need a bit of time to have an adventure, try out different routes in our life or explore different options before going all in. Maybe you have a few gap years, maybe you jump between jobs before finding out what you really want, maybe you are just feeling so lost all the time. Now I know for sure that there are many people that feel this, but it's difficult to remember it when your society and the people on social media constantly praises and share the next milestone, the next career promotion, the next big thing. But now, I believe it's better to be late and at the right place and being early at the wrong place. Picture this, you try to get ahead in your game, knocking down every next milestones that you think you should accomplish as earliest as possible, maybe a family with kids, maybe a big house with a mortgage, and maybe a higher-up position in your career track...then realize that you don't want all of this. It's more difficult to shift direction and start again now, it's possible, but the mental obstacle is much bigger, it's called the sunked cost fallacy. The more you invest time, efforts and money into something, the more difficult it is to give it up.
Alright, alright, we heard it, fixating on being late doesn't help. But what are we supposed to do with this information?
That's exactly the question you should ask yourself, so you're subjectively late, so what? The beauty of this question is that it redirects your focus onto where you have control rather than something you cannot fix. A few other questions that might be helpful to follow up, is late for what? How late? And when did you decide you are gonna get here by this time? Be honest with yourself. If you are critizing yourself for not achieving something that you haven't even set your eyes on, ask yourself which parts of that achievements do you want: Maybe you want more meaning into what you are doing? Or maybe you want more recognition to support your wildly fluctuating self-esteem?
Then in order to move yourself into action, break down it into smaller doable steps. Like when I first started doing podcasting, I thought, I need a voice (check), a microphone (check), a recording software (check), and done.
Also, if you are ever late for a meeting, say this: "Thanks for waiting for me, I'll try to be on time the next time". And just try to do that. My friends, you might have been late in the past, but you are not now.
