Throughout the first quarter of our lives, we all progress at the same rate. We move from grade to grade with our friends and peers through elementary, middle, high school, and finally college. Unless you're one of the rare geniuses who leaps forward early or one of the academically challenged who has to repeat a grade, it's all lockstep together.
And then one day that suddenly ends and all hell breaks loose. No longer is everyone moving forward together in organized concert; everyone now moves all over the life map in total and utter chaos. Marriage, kids, and career come to us on wildly different timetables. Some lucky bastards get all three right out of the gate. Some get married soon but don't have kids or advance far in their career right away. Some get married, have kids right away and put the career on the backburner. Some of us wait for-fucking-ever for marriage, kids, and career. Some get one, two, or three but then abandon marriages and/or career. Some abandon the kids too...jerks!
There are lots of different combinations for these timetables, and though our actions have some influence over them, a lot of it—especially with marriage and career—comes down to blind luck. For those of us that don't luck out quickly, it's a challenge sometimes in those early days but really isn't that bad. In our twenties, it's easy to comfort ourselves with the thought that our day is coming soon. After all, we have our whole lives ahead of us. We're young and free! We can just enjoy the ride and have a lot of fun. No reason to worry yet.
However, once our thirties roll around, that slowly begins to change until one day we snap. Suddenly we don't have our whole lives ahead of us; a lot of it is already behind us. We're not so young and we don't feel so free anymore. We can't just enjoy the ride and have fun. We need to do something with our lives. We need to join the clubs: The Marriage Club, The Kids Club, and The Career Club. By this point, most of our friends are members of at least one, if not two or three. We no longer feel like we're all in it together, patiently biding our time.
Now, it seems that all of a sudden, we're The Leftbehinds. It feels like complete shit. People can throw all the intellectual logic, reason, and philosophy possible at us in an attempt to assure us that it's okay, it's not our fault, our time is still coming, everyone has a different journey, it's all random luck, you can't compare yourself to anyone but your old self, etc. Sometimes, it can help, but it really can't stop us from feeling like shit. What we do with those feelings and how we handle them is absolutely under our control, but having those feelings is not. It's just going to happen, plain and simple.
Being a Leftbehind feels terrible because it feels like you're the kid that got left behind and had to repeat a grade. Why did that kid get left behind? Because they literally failed. Whether it was not doing the work or they couldn't comprehend it, something about them was defective. You feel like that kid: there's something wrong with you. And it's not just one grade. You're stuck in third grade while all your friends are already graduating high school. You're the pathetic adult loser going to school with children. Holy shit, you're Billy Madison! Fuck, no one wants to be Adam Sandler anymore. People can assuage you all day and all night, but it won't stop you from feeling like a failure.
Moreover, the misery is magnified with loneliness because you know the non-Leftbehinds do not understand what it feels like, as much as they try and as much as they care. They can empathize to their best ability, they can imagine what those shoes feel like, but they won't know until they've lived it. It's like if someone you care about has somebody really close to them die. Unless that's happened to you, you don't actually know how it feels. You can make a decent guess, but there are certain emotions that have to be personally experienced to be fully comprehended. When you know the people trying help you don't truly know what it feels like, you feel isolated and alone and their attempts to help you can make you feel even worse. It's the cursed cruel cherry on top of the sad somber sundae.
A big part of why we feel awful in the first place, I think, is because we were never trained on the chaos of life. In fact, for the first quarter of lives, we were trained in the exact opposite: rigid order of life. We all progressed at the same rate, so we still expect that to happen. Even if some wise adults tell us differently, all the evidence we've seen so far points to it. It's all we know. So it's a pretty big kick to the face when it turns out that isn't how the world works, and then a bigger kick to the nuts that no one trained us how to handle it psychologically. It's no wonder a lot of us end up having mental breakdowns. We're thrown into the ocean without having been taught to swim. Hell, we're not even given a floaty. Oh, and guess what, we're in shark infested waters!
I don't have all the answers to how we could train kids—or us adults already drowning in the ocean—to be prepared for this mental and emotional gut-punch, but clearly we need to do something. There are, of course, other reasons this is hard to deal with. Our culture places so much emphasis on marriage, kids, and career as measures of success and happiness, that it's inevitable we feel terrible when we're not achieving them. Placing more emphasis on self-improvement and hard work, regardless of results, would go a long way. However, it's a complex issue with a lot of threads, so I sure as heck am not arrogant enough to think one blog post nails it.
Hopefully, however, this gives some insight into why lots of Leftbehind adults in their thirties and up feel crummy. On behalf of The Leftbehinds, I humbly request that society immediately get to work on figuring out how to prepare kids for the random, chaotic, and unfair progress of adult life. It's not just for the benefit of The Leftbehinds, it's as much for the benefit of those around us too: less existential meltdowns to witness and help with!
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