Jul 2 JDN 2460128
The day I turned 35 years old was one of the worst days of my life, as I wrote about at the time. I think the only times I have felt more depressed than that day were when my father died, when I was hospitalized by an allergic reaction to lamotrigine, and when I was rejected after interviewing for jobs at GiveWell and Wizards of the Coast.
This is notable because… nothing particularly bad happened to me on my 35th birthday. It was basically an ordinary day for me. I felt horrible simply because I was turning 35 and hadn’t accomplished so many of the things I thought I would have by that point in my life. I felt my dreams shattering as the clock ticked away what chance I thought I’d have at achieving my life’s ambitions.
I am slowly coming to realize just how pathological that attitude truly is. It was ingrained in me very deeply from the very youngest age, not least because I was such a gifted child.
While studying quantum physics in college, I was warned that great physicists do all their best work before they are 30 (some even said 25). Einstein himself said as much (so it must be true, right?). It turns out that was simply untrue. It may have been largely true in the 18th and 19th centuries, and seems to have seen some resurgence during the early years of quantum theory, but today the median age at which a Nobel laureate physicist did their prize-winning work is 48. Less than 20% of eminent scientists made their great discoveries before the age of 40.
Alexander Fleming was 47 when he discovered penicillin—just about average for an eminent scientist of today. Darwin was 22 when he set sail on the Beagle, but didn’t publish On the Origin of Species until he was 50. Andre-Marie Ampere started his work in electromagnetism in his forties.
In creative arts, age seems to be no barrier at all. Julia Child published her first cookbook at 50. Stan Lee sold his first successful Marvel comic at 40. Toni Morrison was 39 when she published her first novel, and 62 when she won her Nobel. Peter Mark Roget was 73 when he published his famous thesaurus. Tolkein didn’t publish The Hobbit until he was 45.
Alan Rickman didn’t start drama school until he was 26 and didn’t have a major Hollywood role until he was 42. Samuel L. Jackson is now the third-highest-grossing actor of all time (mostly because of the Avengers movies), but he didn’t have any major movie roles until his forties. Anna Moses didn’t start painting until she was 78.
We think of entrepreneurship as a young man’s game, but Ray Kroc didn’t buy McDonalds until he was 59. Harland Sanders didn’t franchise KFC until he was 62. Eric Yuan wasn’t a vice president until the age of 37 and didn’t become a billionaire until Zoom took off in 2019—he was 49. Sam Walton didn’t found Walmart until he was 44.
Great humanitarian achievements actually seem to be more likely later in life: Gandhi did not see India achieve independence until he was 78. Nelson Mandela was 76 when he became President of South Africa.
It has taken me far too long to realize this, and in fact I don’t think I have yet fully internalized it: Life is not a race. You do not “fall behind” when others achieve things younger than you did. In fact, most child prodigies grow up no more successful as adults than children who were merely gifted or even above-average. (There is another common belief that prodigies grow up miserable and stunted; that, fortunately, isn’t true either.)
Then there is queer time—the fact that, in a hostile heteronormative world, queer people often find ourselves growing up in a very different way than straight people—and crip time—the ways that coping with a disability changes your relationship with time and often forces you to manage your time in ways that others don’t. As someone who came out fairly young and is now married, queer time doesn’t seem to have affected me all that much. But I feel crip time very acutely: I have to very carefully manage when I go to bed and when I wake up, every single day, making sure I get not only enough sleep—much more sleep than most people get or most employers respect—but also that it aligns properly with my circadian rhythm. Failure to do so risks triggering severe, agonizing pain. Factoring that in, I have lost at least a few years of my life to migraines and depression, and will probably lose several more in the future.
But more importantly, we all need to learn to stop measuring ourselves against other people’s timelines. There is no prize in life for being faster. And while there are prizes for particular accomplishments (Oscars, Nobels, and so on), much of what determines whether you win such prizes is entirely beyond your control. Even people who ultimately made eminent contributions to society didn’t know in advance that they were going to, and didn’t behave all that much differently from others who tried but failed.
I do not want to make this sound easy. It is incredibly hard. I believe that I personally am especially terrible at it. Our society seems to be optimized to make us compare ourselves to others in as many ways as possible as often as possible in as biased a manner as possible.
Capitalism has many important upsides, but one of its deepest flaws is that it makes our standard of living directly dependent on what is happening in the rest of a global market we can neither understand nor control. A subsistence farmer is subject to the whims of nature; but in a supermarket, you are subject to the whims of an entire global economy.
And there is reason to think that the harm of social comparison is getting worse rather than better. If some mad villain set out to devise a system that would maximize harmful social comparison and the emotional damage it causes, he would most likely create something resembling social media.
The villain might also tack on some TV news for good measure: Here are some random terrifying events, which we’ll make it sound like could hit you at any moment (even though their actual risk is declining); then our ‘good news’ will be a litany of amazing accomplishments, far beyond anything you could reasonably hope for, which have been achieved by a cherry-picked sample of unimaginably fortunate people you have never met (yet you somehow still form parasocial bonds with because we keep showing them to you). We will make a point not to talk about the actual problems in the world (such as inequality and climate change), certainly not in any way you might be able to constructively learn from; nor will we mention any actual good news which might be relevant to an ordinary person such as yourself (such as economic growth, improved health, or reduced poverty). We will focus entirely on rare, extreme events that by construction aren’t likely to ever happen to you and are not relevant to how you should live your life.
I do not have some simple formula I can give you that will make social comparison disappear. I do not know how to shake the decades of indoctrination into a societal milieu that prizes richer and faster over all other concepts of worth. But perhaps at least recognizing the problem will weaken its power over us.
Human Economics 