I Think We’re All A Little Behind
I want to start with something I’ve been sitting with for a while now. Not a revelation, exactly, more of a slow accumulation of conversations, observations, and one very honest matcha at Watchhouse.
I’m a nutritional therapist, the founder of The Well Edit, and by most external measures, someone who is very much ‘doing well’. I love what I do. My diary is full. My supplement shelf is organised with a level of commitment that would concern some people. And yet the questions keep coming, from well-meaning friends, from family at dinners, from the particular loaded silence that follows a ‘so, how’s your personal life?’ a question which, for the single among us, has a very specific energy. We all know the one. It arrives with a tilt of the head and a kind of sympathetic patience, as if your life is a delayed flight and everyone is waiting for you to land somewhere recognisable. Then comes the unsolicited comfort: ‘It’ll happen when you least expect it.’ I’d like to formally retire that phrase.
A few weeks ago, I met a girlfriend for a catch-up. We settled into Watchhouse with our matcha and did what women do when they actually have time: we told each other the truth. Sat across from her, I thought she had it all. The incredible partner. The house. The wardrobe. And she sat across from me and said she wanted some of what I had - a career she was passionate about, summer plans that were genuinely exciting, and the freedom of a solo Saturday night where no one needs anything from you. Neither of us had the full picture. We just had different parts of it.
That conversation is part of why I’m writing this. Living well isn’t just about what you eat or how you move or whether your cortisol is managed. It’s also about the stories you tell yourself about where you are in life, and whether those stories are actually yours. Understanding your mind, the comparisons it makes, the timelines it invents, the quiet shame it carries about the things you haven’t ticked off yet, is part of the work. Writing this is part of that.
I should also mention: I don’t own a home. I rent in London, which means I pay London prices for the privilege of living the kind of life I’ve built here, something I genuinely never imagined I’d be doing, but dreamt of from a young age. Coming to terms with that, understanding it as a deliberate trade rather than a failure, has been its own quiet reckoning. I’ve written before about whether being deeply invested in your own wellness makes you harder to date. The dating and wellness piece still remains one of the most-read things on this site, but this feels like the broader version of that question. Not just: am I too well to date? But: am I measuring my life against a template that was never designed for the way I actually want to live?
According to the ONS, 8.4 million people in the UK now live alone, up 11% in a decade. Almost a third of all English households contain just one person. And yet the cultural narrative hasn’t caught up. We are still being measured against a timeline that most of us didn’t write and aren’t sure we want. So I asked six people - founders, nine-to-fivers, the newly single, the long-term single, the recently pivoted, to tell me honestly where they feel behind, what they’ve given up, and whether having it all is even something they still want. What came back was more honest, more complicated, and more quietly radical than I expected.
PART ONE: THE FEELING
Ask someone when they first felt behind and you’ll rarely get a clean answer. It’s not usually a single moment. It’s an accumulation, a slow sedimentation of other people’s milestones, filtered through a feed that has been curated by an algorithm that is very good at showing you exactly what you don’t have.
Sara, 31, works in wellness brand growth and splits her time between France and consulting projects across Europe. She completed her MBA in London and came out into a job market that had shifted beneath her. ‘I thought earning my MBA title would be enough to walk into any room,’ she tells me. ‘Instead, I felt like I’d taken two steps backwards while all my friends who didn’t get a masters continued progressing in their careers.’
What’s interesting about Sara’s answer, and what came up again and again across these conversations, is that the feeling of being behind isn’t really about facts. It’s about perception. ‘Being ahead is more a feeling than something I possess or lack,’ she says. ‘It may stem from my own misguided perception, skewed by watching 25-year-olds make millions in the creator economy and young founders exit for unbelievable sums of money.’
“Being ahead is more a feeling than something I possess or lack”
Shyam, 30, runs a technology team for a major retailer and is the only man in this piece - which is itself worth pausing on. When I put out the call to be interviewed, the response from men was notably, almost non existent. This, in the context of what many are calling a male loneliness epidemic, feels telling. The men I know personally will readily admit, in private, that they constantly measure themselves against their peers, careers, salaries, status, both against other men and, increasingly, against women. And yet when it came to putting it on the record? Silence. Shyam was the exception. ‘I started seeing proposals on social media during the wedding season and thinking - when will it be me?’ He’s candid about the trade-off: a fiercely career-driven twenties meant social life and dating took a back seat. He doesn’t exactly regret it. But he’s aware of the cost.
For Emilie, 28, who works in content for a health food brand and recently made a deliberate pivot, taking a pay cut to study something she loves, moving into her own flat, navigating online dating - the feeling has grown louder as her peers have moved in a more conventional direction. ‘My Instagram feed and friendship group are full of engagements, weddings, babies, and next steps. And I’m over here choosing to start over. I know it’s right for me. But that doesn’t always make the comparison easier.’
Georgia, 29, describes watching a close friend excel in health and wellness and feeling both proud and quietly envious. ‘I realised that’s what I wanted to go into. I just didn’t know it when I left uni, so I went for the first job I could get.’ The sense of being behind, for her, is less about romantic milestones and more about professional purpose - the creeping awareness that she took a detour she didn’t intend.
PART TWO: WHAT WE GAVE UP
Every single person I spoke to could name, without hesitation, what they had given up to have what they have. The answers were practical, surprising, and universally unregretted. Which raises an interesting question: if we know the trade-off was worth it, why does the loss still sting?
Sara gave up a lucrative consultancy contract in the US because she believed in a different path. She moved to the south of France to be with her now-husband when staying in a city would have been easier for her career. ‘I am still dealing with the financial consequences,’ she says plainly. ‘But I do not regret these choices. Right now, I enjoy amazing food and sunshine and a slower life in France. But at the same time I envy my friends in big cities who are bulldozing upwards in their careers. We cannot have it all.’
Shyam traded spontaneity for momentum. ‘Not going out to meet friends, not agreeing to last-minute plans, I chose that. And I learnt over time.’ Georgia traded proximity and community for a salary that simply wasn’t available anywhere outside London, working fully remotely, having met her team in person only twice. ‘It can be very lonely and boring,’ she admits.
Fran, 34, runs a finance team and has been single for longer than she’s comfortable with. She moved to London from South Africa, trading family proximity for career and independence. ‘I intentionally chose a career that lasts well, to live in London, to rent a flat I love in a nice area rather than buy what I could afford and compromise on space.’ It’s a choice she stands by. And yet she holds out hope for the rest.
“I’ve always been a late bloomer. I didn’t have it all figured out in my twenties or even my early thirties. I’m happy and at peace with where I am, but I still have a massive thirst for more.”
Sara Babar, 38, coaches women through the pillars of lifestyle medicine and runs her own consultancy. She is the calmest person in this piece about the idea of being behind, and perhaps the most instructive. ‘I have always been a late bloomer,’ she says. ‘I went from HR to F&B to business development to having my own consultancy. Every couple of years I pivot and do something else.’ When I ask whether deciding she was enough would feel like peace or like giving up, she says: ‘It would not feel like giving up. But it might feel like settling. And I do not like to settle.’
PART THREE: THE COMPARISON MACHINE
Almost every person I spoke to mentioned social media within the first few sentences. Which shouldn’t be surprising, research consistently links upward social comparison online with lower self-esteem and heightened anxiety, and almost half of millennials report feeling financial stress after seeing others’ purchases on their feeds. But what was interesting was how nuanced the relationship with it actually is. Nobody here is simply a passive victim of the scroll.
‘Social media can be amazing, but you can quickly compare in the back of your mind so fast,’ says Shyam. ‘You see what your feed wants you to see. But I try to use it as a driver, when I see someone touring an amazing house, I put it on the vision board.’ Sara G. is more resigned: ‘Social media. Always.’ Full stop. She doesn’t elaborate because she doesn’t need to.
Interestingly, Fran, who creates content herself - says it’s not social media that makes her feel most behind. It’s her friendship group and her family. ‘My middle brother got married earlier this year and it really hit me.’ Georgia points straight to family: ‘I’m constantly being asked why I’m not engaged yet and when I’m having babies.’ The external timeline, it turns out, doesn’t just live online, but as we all know from the family gatherings it also lives at the dinner table.
What struck me most was the admission that almost everyone could identify a moment of feeling ahead and how uncomfortable that felt. Shyam was ahead of friends in his career when they were still finding their footing after university. ‘It felt odd, mainly because I felt powerless. I wished I could do something for them.’ Georgia owns her home at 29 in a housing market that has made that nearly impossible for many of her peers, and she’s thoughtful about it: ‘I would be naive to say my start in life didn’t help me get there.’
PART FOUR: WHAT WE’RE ACTUALLY BUILDING
Strip away the house, the relationship, the title, the body the whole architecture of what we’re supposed to want and what’s left? I asked everyone this question. The answers were, without exception, gentler than I expected.
‘A life full of adventure, surrounded by wonderful, kind, and intelligent people,’ says Sara G. Emilie wants a life that feels free, ‘more time to learn, to grow, to enjoy things. Real joy, not just going through the motions.’ Georgia wants to build businesses in health and wellness. Shyam describes something almost impossible to articulate: ‘A small, powerful version of happiness so concentrated it can’t be stripped away or knocked at.’
What strikes me is how few of these answers include the things we’re told we should be chasing. Nobody said corner office. Nobody said ring on their finger. Nobody said the house, even though some of them are actively working towards one. What they described, almost to a person, was alignment. Purpose. The feeling of building something that is genuinely theirs.
Fran is perhaps the most interesting case. She’s building her content brand into something significant. When I ask whether she actually wants a relationship or whether it’s partly just what she thinks she should want, she pauses: ‘Most of the time I don’t feel like I’m missing one. But I hold out hope that it will happen.’ That sentence contains a whole world. Hope without desperation. Openness without urgency. It sounds, actually, like quite a healthy place to be.
““If you stripped all of that away, what I want to build is a true life with balance. I want to find the sweet spot of contentment where I am not always running against the clock.”
Sara Babar puts it most precisely: she wants to find the sweet spot of contentment where she is not always forced to choose between her personal life and her professional life. ‘I am exactly where I need to be. And doing it with purpose, because I have this bigger picture, you can call it a dream, and I know I am laying the foundation for that.’
There is something quietly radical about that. Not having it all. Not being ahead. Just laying foundations, on your own timeline, for something that actually makes sense to you.
A FINAL THOUGHT
I don’t think we’re behind. I think we’re just paying attention to the wrong clock.
The timeline we’re being measured against, finish education, secure career, find partner, buy home, have children, do it all simultaneously and make it look effortless - was never designed to account for pivots, or late bloomers, or people who choose the south of France over the fast track, or thirty-four-year-olds who are quietly building something brilliant and haven’t met the right person yet. It doesn’t account for the trade-offs that are invisible to everyone but you. And it certainly doesn’t account for the person sitting across from you at Watchhouse who, from the outside, appears to have everything and is quietly wondering if she made the right calls.
What I took from these conversations is not simply that comparison is the thief of joy, though it is. It’s that we are all, in some form, building something. The house, the career, the relationship, the body, the business, these are just the named versions of a deeper project, which is figuring out what a life that actually fits you looks like. That project doesn’t have a completion date. It cannot be ahead or behind schedule, because nobody else is running the same race.
So the next time someone asks how your personal life is going, with that particular tilt of the head, you can tell them it’s going exactly as planned. Even if, especially if, the plan is still being written, because it’s being written, WELL.
Words by Eleanor Hoath for The Well Edit.
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