Why We Feel Behind Even When We’re Doing Fine

Writer: Eliza Prole
Editor: Dory Huang

It’s nearly midnight. Notifications keep lighting up your phone, each one a small reminder that everyone else seems to be succeeding while you scroll. Your friend just announced her amazing summer internship. Your cousin has started a nonprofit, and your classmates are taking leadership roles and acing their tests. Suddenly, your own achievements start to seem insignificant, and that familiar feeling of falling behind starts to rise.

FEELING BEHIND:

“Feeling behind” is the belief that we aren’t doing “enough” and that everyone else is doing more than we are. Society makes us feel like we’re failing to meet expectations around university, careers, and success as teenagers. Someone can be objectively successful and still feel inadequate. There’s always someone who seems to be doing more, whether it is getting into a top university, getting top grades, starting a business, or going viral online. Now in the 21st century, academic pressures have risen, becoming a global competition over social platforms. Teens are expected to have their whole life figured out before they’ve even fully explored who they are (Only Education, 2025). Rather than focusing on emotional health, personal growth, passions, or relationships, we often measure success by what we accomplish (Kim, 2025). 

PRODUCTIVITY PRESSURE:

The definition of “success” has expanded beyond grades to productivity. Success is no longer just about acing a test, but about who can do the most internships, the most volunteering, and the most extracurriculars. Hustle culture glorifies endless work, making students feel like they must always be productive and grind without rest. Toxic productivity is when you become so obsessed with work that your health suffers (Picagli, 2025). This toxic productivity leads to chronic stress, burnout, anxiety, and depression, mostly formed over the guilt of resting. Competitive university admissions push students to take on more work and extracurriculars, feeding the productivity grind. Many students push through burnout instead of slowing down due to high expectations for themselves and pressure to continue doing what they are doing to achieve “success” (Harmony United, 2025).

BURNOUT:

Burnout among students comes from overexertion, causing both physical and emotional exhaustion, stress, anxiety, and depression. Stress is short-term, and burnout is what happens when stress lasts too long (Anthony, 2025). This constant push for success takes a toll on students’ mental and physical health. Even as students suffer from burnout, they continue pushing themselves forward, driven by an unspoken competition with their peers.

THE UNSPOKEN COMPETITION:

Life feels like a competition, even when no one says it is. Success is often portrayed as being “better” than everyone else, rather than finding success individually. With this mindset in place, success begins to feel like we must “crush the competition” in order to achieve our goals. Students silently compare grades, internships, universities, and general productivity levels all the time. University competition can become exhausting and feel impossible to keep up with. When others have something that we didn’t think of before, we feel the urge to do that thing, so we don’t fall behind. If a friend mentions a perfect internship, pressure builds to apply for one too- even if it’s the same one. Comparison distorts our reality by omitting struggles and giving us the final outcome (Snelling, 2025). Admitting you feel behind can be difficult, as it feels like everyone else is winning while you’re falling short. As humans, we evaluate ourselves by comparing ourselves to others, whether that’s comparing ourselves to someone “better” or “worse off”. When we see others getting praised for their achievements, it makes us feel inadequate. This constant comparison is made worse by the platforms we use every day, which flood us with curated success stories.

SOCIAL MEDIA:

Social media amplifies these feelings of inadequacy by showing us the seemingly perfect lives of influencers, people who graduated high school at 14, and teens becoming hugely successful. These social media posts may feel like real life, but usually, they are exaggerated or sometimes even fake. Algorithms make highlight reels feel real, and searching for study tips can quickly fill your feed with productivity content. They feel real because they mirror what you are already feeling. For example, watching a video about internships in medicine can quickly influence what appears next on your feed. The algorithm will then push more content about med school, dream jobs in healthcare, and other success stories, which can shape your sense of what success should look like. When we compare our private struggles to others’ curated wins, we are overcome with the feeling that others’ lives are somehow more “perfect” than ours, and that since these people don’t post their struggles, they must not have any. Constant achievement content makes us feel inadequate and warps our sense of what’s normal or realistic. So how do we break free from this cycle of comparison and feelings of inadequacy?

CONCLUSION:

Everyone’s timeline for success is different.  It is not up to you to have your life figured out as a teenager, no matter how much it may feel like it. These feelings are often a collective illusion, meaning that all of us are convinced that we are falling behind our peers. Next time you feel behind, take a moment to pause, celebrate the small wins, define success on your own terms, and remember that life isn’t a race. Even if your phone suggests otherwise, you are successful in your own right.