Ignore the ‘social clock’ and go at your own pace

By a certain age, the story goes, you should have a few things locked down: a successful career, a loving partner, a couple of children running around in the house that you’ve purchased.

If you miss these markers, dread tends to set in. You may feel everyone else is moving forward, and that somehow you’ve fallen behind. This is one of the most common anxieties we encounter in life. It’s also one of the most misunderstood.

As a developmental psychologist, I want to offer a more accurate and liberating account of what’s actually going on. The feeling of being behind is real. The timeline producing it, is not.

Some psychologists call this schedule we set in our minds as a society the “social clock.” In 1965, American developmental researcher Bernice Neugarten and colleagues described these age norms as a set of shared expectations about the “right” age to finish school, marry, buy a home or start a family.

These age norms may feel like natural law. But they are not. They are cultural conventions, and like all conventions they vary from place to place and shift from one generation to the next.

‘BEHIND’ COMPARED TO WHAT, EXACTLY?

Our norms have shifted dramatically.

In 2000, American psychologist Jeffrey Arnett argued that the late teens and 20s had become a distinct new stage of life he called emerging adulthood, a prolonged period of exploration in which the traditional milestones arrive later, if at all.

The data is unambiguous. According to Statistics Canada, about 16 per cent of millennials aged 25 to 39 were living with a parent in 2021, roughly double the share of baby boomers at the same age.

People are leaving home, partnering and having children later, often for economic reasons. So when you measure yourself against the timetable your grandparents kept, you’re not failing to keep pace. You are being judged by a schedule that no longer exists.

THE FEED THRIVES ON COMPARISONS

Why, then, does the feeling bite so hard? Because of a second and older mechanism.

In 1954, psychologist Leon Festinger proposed that humans have a basic drive to evaluate themselves by comparison with others, and that we rely on this most heavily when objective standards are missing. “Being behind” is a comparison, and comparisons need a reference point.

In the past, that reference point was the few dozen people in your community. Today it is a curated, global, endless social media highlight reel: the cousin’s engagement, the classmate’s promotion, the stranger’s home tour. The effect is measurable, and could be significantly problematic.

A 2023 meta-analysis pooling 48 articles and nearly 7,700 participants found that exposure to people who appear to be doing better in life on social media reliably worsens how people evaluate themselves and how they feel.

A recent systematic review and meta-analysis associates this kind of comparison with symptoms of depression and anxiety, at least to some degree. We have built a system that manufactures the sensation of falling behind, and then we blame ourselves for feeling it.

The social norms timetable, however, was never a measure of your worth. It was only a rough story about when things were supposed to happen — and you are allowed to live by a more accurate one. It also helps to remember what these social platforms actually show you.

HOW TO REPLACE THE ‘SOCIAL CLOCK’

The “social clock” is a cultural concept. It’s not natural, and it has shifted in comparison to the one we inherited.

This sense of dread that you’re losing a race is amplified by an environment engineered to produce it through the near-limitless social comparison that modern social platforms foster. None of this necessarily means your life is off-track because there is no single track.

A 2025 study of nearly 2,000 adolescents found that the more they focus on the carefully curated version of life that social media rewards, the lower their well-being tends to be. Earlier research helps explain why.

The more we consume other people’s social media posts, the more we conclude that everyone else is happier and better off than we are. It is worth considering that what you are comparing yourself against is not other people’s lives. It is the best moments they chose to show, measured against the unedited reality of your own.

Human development is lifelong, individual and rarely linear.

Try focusing on measuring the right things. For example, notice when you’re comparing upward, since that is the specific ingredient the evidence shows does harm. Curate what you consume accordingly. Cutting back on comparison-heavy platforms is associated with better well-being, though the size of the benefit varies from person to person.

Remember, being inspired by others is not bad, but above all, replace the “social clock” with your own. Set goals tied to your own values rather than to someone else’s, and judge your progress against where you were, not against where a stranger’s profile suggests you ought to be.

» Ali Jasemi is a lecturer at Wilfrid Laurier University. This column was originally published at The Conversation Canada: theconversation.com/ca