One comment I keep on hearing over and over again is how “My classmates are already settled. They’re hitting one milestone after another and I’m still here…They have BMW’s and houses…”
Blah blah blah.
I understand where such statements come from; the narrative that there is a universal blueprint for major milestones in people’s life; graduation, marriage, owning a home (aka financial stability). And that just came into being because at some point we decided that average needs to be universal.
Why is that when people themselves are unique, and their stories are unique?
I mean, seriously. Look closely at your social network, and listen to the stories that are not being portrayed on Facebook. There are some that are really sad and heartbreaking, and definitely not part of the blueprint; couples battling each other in divorce courts, millennials who received their last payslips for the year and are now moving in with their parents, others fighting for their lives in cancer clinics.
However, the real question people are asking when they’re jealously stalking their friends’ posts on instagram is, “Why not me?”
And maybe that stems from a place where we think the world owes us something just because of…what, exactly? We’re our parents’ kids? Or we have so-and-so degree? Or we are superawesome for simply being us?
When you look at the ‘why not me’ generation, we don’t do much to change the situation. All we do is log into social media, compare, complain, then sign out and go back to our lives. Do we try to change the situation? No. Do we put in longer hours? No. Do we start a side hustle? No. A lot of people ‘think’ of starting side-hustles. They debate. Talk. Analyse. Build a pro-con list. Then they go to sleep.
Because if we were really trying hard, then maybe we wouldn’t even be in social media to begin with. We wouldn’t be in a position to actually feel jealous of our friends who’ve figured it out. And even if we were on social media, we wouldn’t really care of what they’re doing because we’re too busy thinking about what we are actually doing.
We would be busy focusing on growing ourselves, adding new good habits like reading and exercising, because we would know that the only competition we really, really, really have is who we were yesterday.
So what action are you planning to take today to be better than who you were yesterday? Let me know your comments on this post on twitter @ahechoes.
Photography (c) A. AlBarwani
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Also, check out my short story collection, “All Bleeding Stops and Other Short Stories from the Kenyan Coast,” and the non-fiction book summarizing a lot of ideas in the personal development field if you want to change your life but don’t know where to start, “Mine your inner resources”.