Irvin Yalom published his first book, on group psychotherapy, in 1970. He was thirty-nine. I thought: all right, fine, I’m not behind yet. Then the question turned back on me. Behind what? Behind whom? Who had set that date? And why did someone else have to have published late enough for me to be able to breathe?

I am a psychologist. I spend my days deconstructing these social injunctions with the people I work with. And there I was, looking up someone else’s career to check whether mine was still acceptable.

It is no accident that Yalom came to mind. What I admire in him is that ability to be both a therapist and a novelist. Since childhood, I have had this dream of writing. I loved reading, I loved video games, I loved stepping into invented worlds. In the end, that is not so far from what we do in therapy: when we meet someone, we step into a construction of the world that is not our own, and that is what fascinates me about this profession.

I made another comparison, even more improbable, as I approached forty. Emmanuel Macron had been elected President of the Republic at thirty-nine. I was happy in my life, I loved psychology, I played World of Warcraft. And yet a question still arrived: have I missed something? There was no organised competition between our two paths. I had just invented one. Or rather, a way of looking at life, learnt somewhere, had just invited itself into my head.

You may have known this feeling. A friend has had a child, a colleague has been promoted, someone your age has bought a house or published a book. A minute earlier, your life suited you. And suddenly, without anything having changed, it seems to have lost value. To understand that moment, I suggest we look at three things: how life becomes a race, why it is so hard to free yourself from it alone, and what we can change in our relationships so that this race takes up a little less room.

How do you know if you are winning?

Imagine a race. You are running, you can feel your legs working, you are making an effort. But how do you know whether you are winning? You look at where the others are. You can run faster than yesterday: if someone overtakes you, you still feel you are losing. You can run more slowly: if everyone is behind you, you feel ahead. Your assessment depends on the ranking, not on what you are experiencing.

In a sporting competition, that logic is coherent. There is an event, there are rules, there is a finish line. When we apply it to existence, what exactly are we measuring? Salary, the couple, the number of children, the job title, the house, whether we travel? All these elements have become markers of success that give us the feeling there are stages to get through before we have the right to move on.

Social media did not invent comparison. We could already compare ourselves with a neighbour, a brother, a personality seen on television. But we have never lived in a society that gives us such constant access to what other people are doing. You only have to open a phone to see scrolling past, side by side, the paths of people who grew up in contexts that have nothing to do with ours, with means that are not ours. Social inequalities are laid bare, and we compare ourselves anyway.

It is as if we were taking part in a race with Usain Bolt and the greatest champions of the discipline. Imagine a teenager discovering athletics. He enjoys running, he is getting to know his body, he is improving. Then, every time he wants to know what he is worth, he is shown Bolt. If he turns that exceptional performance into the minimum level required to be respectable, his own progress becomes invisible. He can admire the champion and end up despising himself as he watches him. The two often coexist. And those champions have devoted their lives to this, at the cost of sacrifices we do not see and would probably not want for ourselves.

On a news feed, however, the exceptional nature of a path is far less legible than on a track. One person has a remarkable career. Another has a highly sculpted body. A third travels. A fourth shows off a wonderful relationship. We gather these fragments into a single expectation: we would have to be all of that at once. We then measure ourselves against a composite life, made up of the best pieces of several existences.

What is more, the comparison starts from two different objects. Of my own life, I know the hesitations, the ordinary days, the contradictions. Of the other person’s, I see what has been shown. A happy moment can be real, a success can be real, but a succession of chosen moments is not a whole life. The gap between the representation I have of my life and the one I form of theirs is precisely the tension that settles in me, in my body and in my days.

I am wary of sweeping claims about what social media is supposedly doing to an entire generation. Research shows that its effects on self-esteem vary a great deal from one adolescent to another (Valkenburg et al., 2021). Some experiments do, however, describe a precise mechanism: among young girls, exposure to retouched selfies damages their body image, and even more so among those who tend to compare themselves (Kleemans et al., 2018). That does not prove that social media harms everyone. It shows why what we compare ourselves with matters.

Finally, there is a loop that a systemic reading invites us to look at. Someone displays a spectacular success and receives a great deal of recognition. Others understand that they, too, must show something impressive in order to exist. Posts become a reference for those who look at them and for those preparing the next ones. Nobody consciously sets out to make us feel inferior. The pressure emerges from everyone’s efforts to find a place.

The mythologies of success

At this point, we might tell ourselves that we simply need to choose more carefully the people we compare ourselves with. That is sometimes useful. But we have not yet questioned the main rule: why should lives be ranked at all? Saying “everyone moves at their own pace” is comforting. Yet behind that sentence we can still hear that everyone must move along the same track, just at different speeds. What if someone did not want to head towards the same finish line?

This is where Roland Barthes helps me. In Mythologies (1957), he studies how images and discourses make meanings that were constructed historically appear natural. Myth is not simply a false story: it rests on something real, then makes it carry a social self-evidence. Someone poses in front of their house. We see a person and a house. We can also read into it: here is an accomplished life, here is where you should be by now. That second message depends on a system of values, and the photo makes us forget it. Barthes is not writing about Instagram, of course. It is we who are extending his reading here.

Take a very widespread myth: success means climbing the ladder. For many people, taking charge of other people in a management role is not at all what they want, and it can even make them unhappy. Because society keeps telling them that success is measured by hierarchy, they submit to that injunction. We take the best person on the team, we promote them to manager, and because they are good at doing, they start advising others on what they should be doing. Everyone below them ends up feeling less competent, and a whole system of disqualification falls into place. Reproaches mount, the manager feels ineffective, sometimes to the point of burnout. Everyone’s self-esteem has been damaged, and nobody wanted that.

A teacher can deepen their craft for thirty years without wanting to become a head teacher. A nurse can want to carry on caring for patients without becoming a manager. There is experience there, transmission, development. It is just that the organisation chart does not move. If our only image of progress is a ladder, everything that grows in other ways becomes hard to see.

Our identity is a montage

For Michael White and David Epston (2003), our identity is relational and narrative. It is built in interactions, and it is built as a story. And to tell a story is to select. If you filmed the whole of a person’s life for a month, you could not put that month end to end and make a film of it. You would have to choose. By keeping the moments of doubt, you would tell a story about doubt. By keeping the successes, you would produce an inspiring narrative. The same days, two different stories.

We do exactly the same thing with our own existence, without being aware of it. We are constantly editing the film of our lives, giving more room to the elements that confirm the plot already in place. And this editing is not done alone: it is co-constructed with the stories others tell about us and with the feedback they send back to us.

One story can then become very invasive: “I am behind.” A friend buys a flat, that is proof. A colleague is promoted, more proof. You start something at forty-five, proof again, since you should have started earlier. Meanwhile, you may have supported a loved one, gone through an illness, learnt to live after a separation. These events earn no points in that ranking. The story of being behind simply does not know how to tell them.

The narrative approach then offers questions that I like to ask, of my patients and of myself. When does the story of being behind take up the most room? What does it push you to do, and what does it stop you from appreciating? Which important events in your life is it unable to tell? We begin to treat being behind as a story that exerts an influence on us, rather than as our entire identity. And we search real experience for more to tell.

The myth of the self-made person

There is a very widespread answer to this unease: decide who you want to be, change your mindset, take back control. We find it in schools, in health and social care, and spectacularly in certain coaching movements. The big American coaches, Tony Robbins first among them, offer personal transformation seminars, often very expensive, from which you are promised to come out as a new version of yourself.

I do not dispute that a decision can change something. I am wary of the idea that a person could decide their identity on their own, as if they could produce themselves independently of the world they live in. What we observe when people come out of these seminars is quite telling: they are galvanised for the following month, then they go back to their earlier ways of functioning. A person who changes their representation of themselves on their own, within a system that has not changed its representation of them, is constantly invited to take up the place they used to occupy. That is probably why you have to go back every year.

You decide that you have the right to slow down. But those around you still admire you mostly when you work hard, your company values people who are always available, your friends systematically ask what you are preparing next. Your decision meets a world that goes on telling your story differently. That does not make it useless. It makes it much harder to sustain. And if we forget that context, we add an accusation to the problem: you had understood, so why haven’t you changed? As if the persistence of a difficulty only proved a lack of willpower.

In a systemic reading, then, we do not first seek to act on the individual so that they become self-determining. We seek to act on the context: the couple, the family, the team and, if we go up a level, the grand narratives that structure society and manufacture suffering. Would there be as much anorexia in a society that did not celebrate thinness so much? We live in a narrative in which the slim or athletic person is seen as brave and determined, and the person who carries weight as someone lacking willpower. That narrative structures the dynamics of the suffering we encounter in consultation.

Flying fish: it is not your fault

Charlie Crettenand uses an image I am very fond of: flying fish. We sometimes leap out of the water for a moment, out of that great bath of dominant narratives. A video, a seminar, a conversation, a therapy session, and suddenly something becomes visible. We understand a repetition, we recognise an expectation, we see that we have mistaken a judgement for a truth about ourselves. For a moment, we look at the water from outside.

Then we dive back in. The next day there is the same job, the same conversations, the same rewards, the same fears of disappointing. We cannot live outside these narratives, and they end up getting under our skin. The image has a limit: an insight leaves traces, and the return of a difficulty does not cancel out what we have understood. But it shows what the promise of the lightbulb moment forgets. Seeing the current is not always enough to change the conditions in which we swim.

If I say this, it is first of all to lift the guilt. If you feel that you are behind in your life, that you are not enough, that you should be doing better, that your life would be better elsewhere or if you were someone else, I would really like to tell you: it is not your fault. That feeling was socially constructed. Realising this does not change everything, but it is already essential, because it allows you to stop blaming yourself for it endlessly.

Changing the water a little, together

So, what can we do? I believe far more in changes that find collective support than in the promise of an individual who has become independent of all influence. And the collective begins very close to us: in our couple, our family, our circle of friends, our team at work. Each and every one of us has the possibility of accepting, or not, the grand narratives that circulate through a multitude of seemingly trivial little remarks.

A male colleague jokes about women’s sense of direction. A female colleague makes fun of men’s inability to do two things at once. If I accept that, even in a humorous tone, I am helping to carry those narratives along. We should not then be surprised that women feel disqualified when they get behind the wheel, and that men feel validated in the idea that their partner will take on more at home. I have a responsibility at that point: to show my surprise, to ask how that representation came to be, to offer a counter-example, in a joking tone if need be, without getting into confrontation. Through these small interactions, we have a real effect on the people around us.

Some of us have a platform: running an organisation, addressing an audience on social media. That power is different, and it carries more responsibility. A person who sets the criteria for recognition in a company can change the rule where a precarious employee cannot. Saying that pressure circulates between us must not make those who can act on its conditions disappear.

Take an imaginary team. One person answers work messages at ten in the evening. Their manager congratulates them on their commitment. Colleagues understand that this availability is appreciated, some start doing the same, and what was exceptional becomes expected. The one who switches off their phone in the evening ends up feeling uncommitted. Nobody decided to make everyone unhappy. But some people’s reactions change other people’s behaviour, and then those behaviours change expectations. That is why “set your boundaries” remains insufficient as long as the organisation rewards those who overstep them. Sometimes explicit rules, resources and protections are needed. You do not pay your rent with a kinder conversation. But conversations, too, are part of the environment.

In a family, we can look at what we celebrate. Good marks count, of course. But do we also notice curiosity, attention paid to someone, the pleasure of learning something without being immediately good at it? Can a teenager talk about an interest without immediately being asked what they are going to do with it professionally? When someone discovers running, do we take an interest in what they enjoy about running before asking how many kilometres they do a day? At work, is it possible to let someone stay in a job they love without interpreting their refusal of a promotion as a lack of ambition?

With our friends, finally. A friend tells you about a promotion. You can be happy for them. You can also ask them whether they like the job, what it changes in their days, what they hope to find there. You make room for their experience, beyond their ranking. And if another friend is going through a period with no big announcements, do you stay just as curious about their life? Can they come and see you without having something impressive to report? A group can assert that everyone has value and, in practice, give its attention only to the most visible successes.

Witnesses for other stories

In some narrative practices, witnesses are invited to listen to and acknowledge what a person expresses of their values and commitments (Carey & Russell, 2003). These practices are linked to the work of the anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff (1982) on definitional ceremonies. The idea that interests me here is simple: another story of oneself can find support in a community, if it is invited in at certain symbolic moments. That is one of the reasons I am so interested in therapeutic and performative rituals.

In our ordinary relationships, we can draw inspiration from this without reproducing a whole set-up. Imagine a friend telling you: “This year, I did nothing.” Yet you know they looked after their sick mother. You can ask them what that presence meant to them, what they wanted to preserve, what helped them to be there. You are not giving them a better mark. You are making visible a part of their existence that the ranking erased. And perhaps that conversation leaves a trace: someone else saw it, someone remembers it. That support counts when the story of being behind comes back.

When we are not doing well, our first reflex, because it too is a mythology we are steeped in, is to look for an answer: talk to a coach, talk to our friends, find a meaning. Words matter. But I am convinced that what brings change is very often actions, added to words. A ritual, a team rule that has been changed, a conversation that recurs differently, do more than a resolution made alone in front of the mirror.

But beware of a new race. We could end up comparing ourselves to see who is the most supportive, the most authentic, the most liberated from comparisons. We could turn happiness into an obligation: after succeeding in your career, you would have to succeed at fulfilment. What I am looking for is that we can count in a relationship without constantly having to present proof of a performance. Even when we are tired. Even when we hesitate. Even when we have no fine story of progress to offer.