WorkLore

As humans, we are generally very good at comparison, especially when we compare ourselves to others. Social media makes this worse because it shows us people well beyond our family, friends, and next door neighbours that we can compare ourselves to. 

This can create anxiety and often that anxiety feels like falling behind, the proverbial failure of “keeping up with the Joneses”. That’s because we have an idea in our head that researchers call the “social clock”. It’s the clock that tells us that we should do X by Y age or we should have achieved A by the time of our B’s birthday. 

When we don’t hit those milestones in what we imagine our social clock to be, we might feel we’ve lost all chance to every achieve them. 

But as Ali Jasemi suggests: 

“Human Development is lifelong, individual and rarely linear”

As someone who only started university at 29 years old, who had a family before a degree, who only obtained her professional certification 4 decades after starting work, I think my social clock might be broken. 

I’ve proven to myself more than once that not doing things on the timeline that everyone else is following isn’t a death knell. 

It’s just different. 

And it’s been good. Really good. Yes, it might have been harder a few times, but overall, I have no regrets for not following a traditional path. 

What about you? 

What things have you done out of sequence from when “everyone” else expected you to do them? What was your result?