At twenty-seven, someone begins to worry that they have left marriage too late.
At thirty-five, someone else feels they ought to own a home by now.
At forty, a man watches a former colleague become a director and wonders what he has done with all those years.
Nobody seems to know who set these deadlines.
Yet we live as though we all agreed to them.
There is apparently a right age to succeed, to fall in love, to settle down, even to stop making mistakes.
And the curious thing is that we can feel reasonably content with our lives until we see somebody else's.
A photograph of a new house.
A promotion announcement.
A wedding.
A holiday somewhere we have never been.
Suddenly, everything we have seems worth a little less than it did five minutes ago, although nothing about it has changed.
We are not simply comparing possessions or achievements.
We are comparing ages.
"He's five years younger than me," we say.
As though five years of one person's life ought to produce exactly what five years produced for another.
But we do not all begin in the same place.
Some inherit a home. Others begin adulthood paying off their father's debts.
Some discover what they want early. Others spend years trying to find work they can bear doing.
Some can afford to take risks because there is a family ready to catch them. Others cannot afford a single mistake.
One person reaches thirty having travelled the world. Another has barely left the town where they were born.
None of this makes one life better than another.
It does, however, make the comparison rather less straightforward than the numbers suggest.
Still, I don't think we need to pretend that comparison never hurts.
It is perfectly human to look at what someone else has achieved and wish, for a moment, that it were yours.
It is human to mourn missed opportunities, or years that did not turn out as you hoped.
Not every sadness is envy.
Sometimes we are not jealous of somebody else's success at all.
We are grieving an older picture of our own future, one we never quite managed to reach.
The trouble begins when we treat other people's lives as evidence that ours have somehow failed.
We forget that the person whose career we admire may envy our free time.
That the person whose marriage we long for may miss the independence we take for granted.
That somebody who appears to have arrived may not feel they have arrived anywhere.
This does not mean everyone is secretly miserable.
Some people really are happy. Some really are successful. Some have built lives they genuinely love.
We can be pleased for them without treating their happiness as bad news about ourselves.
Perhaps we need to ask a different question.
Not, "Why haven't I achieved what they have?"
But:
"Do I still want the things I once believed I was supposed to have?"
We may discover that some of the races exhausting us are races we never consciously entered.
And that we are not necessarily late for life.
Sometimes we are only late for a deadline set by people who have never known us.
— Malek Ayoub