Why we feel behind in life: from Rory Gilmore to the 'career woman' trope

this video was sponsored by Squarespace when I was a kid I had it all figured out I was going to graduate at 22 and get a really cool job meet the love of my life at 25 spend the next few years focusing on my career and then get engaged at around 28 married at 30 and after that we'd get a house have some kids and live happily ever after and here I am today a teenage girl in my very very very late 20s who makes YouTube videos for a living and just to be clear I'm

very grateful for everything that I have but it's difficult not to notice that my life didn't really turn out the way I thought it would and I think the algorithm knows this I don't know how but it does because about a month ago days before my birthday which is when I'm at my most vulnerable I started seeing this type of video and I was quickly introduced to the falling behind in life phenomenon a trend for lack of a better term where people aged anywhere between their late 20s and their late 30s share their personal experiences

of feeling lost in life and struggling with the reality that they are not quite where they hoped they would be by the time they reach their current age either in their career or their personal relationships the more official term for this feeling in the media is Milestone anxiety and according to a study from the relationship counseling charity relate the pressure to hit traditional life Milestones like getting married buying a house graduating and advancing in the workplace and eventually settling down and starting a family is affecting younger people more than previous generations the first few things

that I noticed about these videos were that they were predominantly made by women and I will say more about that in a minute and that the creators of these videos often talk about feeling confused because they feel like they got to this point despite doing everything right they were good in school they worked hard and they did everything that was asked of them by their family and their Community but ever since they left school everything kind of just fell apart and they feel like the road map for adulthood that they were given doesn't quite match

up to what it means to be an adult today a separate thing I've noticed is that alongside the rising popularity of this video format there has also been a rise in advice videos from self-help content creators who are addressing specifically people who feel behind in life not that I have a problem with it necessarily my issue is that the advice they give is always just oh just enjoy where you are and life right now and life is a journey and your uniqueness is your power and you shouldn't compare yourself to anybody else which is not

necessarily bad advice it's a little cringe but I agree that some people's main problem is that they just think about themselves a little bit too much that being said I know for a fact that there are a lot of people out there who don't excessively compare themselves to their peers I'm one of them and that's not because I'm particularly evolved as a person I've just just happened to have bizarre circumstances that didn't allow me to develop a uniform peer group I'll give you the cliff notes I was born in Romania and I lived there until

8th grade when my family moved to Italy I went to high school there and After High School I moved to London where I ended up for a while for a few years actually doing a bunch of odd bizarre jobs before eventually going to University and got into pretty prestigious universities which is not something that anybody I knew at that time had done before so I've always been hyper aware of the fact that although I have a lot of friends whom I love and who have been there for me I could never fully relate to them

because my life experience has just been a bit different and because of that I also grew aware of the fact that I shouldn't probably use their lives as a yard stick for my own so I just don't compare myself to people in that way but I would be lying if I said that I couldn't relate to any any of those falling behind in life videos that I watched so at this stage in my thought process about this topic I decided to do what I always do when faced with difficult emotions ask myself two questions where

is this complicated feeling coming from and can I blame it on Rory Gilmore I promise there's a good reason why I'm bringing Rory into this but before I explain I have to tell you about today's sponsor Squarespace over the past few weeks I've been documenting the process of slowly putting my website together which is probably the most adult thing I've done in a while and one of the things I really want to get right is the overall look which might sound counterintuitive for somebody whose work is words not images but I feel like in the

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we're from Romania and if you're familiar with the history of socialism in Europe you will know that the early to mid90s which is when my parents were entering their 30s were not an easy time for my people so the whole meme of the parents buying a house at 27 while 27 year- olds today can barely afford coffee doesn't really apply to me that much like many other people whose parents had to have a 100,000 jobs I spent a lot of my childhood watching television which is why I think that a lot of my ideas of

what a successful adult looks like came from movies and TV series specifically movies and TV series about the young career woman who is fresh out of a top tier University who has a bright career ahead of her and is so Charming that she manages to somehow on top of her busy schedule fall into the perfect relationship without even trying I'm talking about Andy in the devil wees Prada Abby in the Ugly Truth Becky in Morning Glory another Andy and How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days they all embody the same archetype the intelligent hardworking

woman of a nonspecified age but which we are given to understand Falls somewhere at the cusp between their 20s and 30s who at the beginning of the narrative are given an opportunity to take the next step in their professional lives although they don't usually come with a huge amount of backstory we are also given to understand that up until this point at least their lives have had a pretty linear trajectory they were straight A students class presidents valedictorians prom queens they went to college where they ran the student newspaper and graduated top of their class

and so on take Andy from The Devil Weare Prada for example who moved moved to New York to do serious journalism at the beginning of the movie when she shows up for her interview at Runway magazine carrying clippings of her articles that she wrote for her University paper and wearing this office appropriate outfit that is meant to tell us that she's far too occupied with intelligent thoughts to think about fashion it's not too hard to picture this movie as a sort of continuation of Rory Gilmore's story after graduation the same goes for Kate Hudson's Andy

in How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days where she is also working for a fashion magazine and comes up with a crazy article Concept in the hopes that it would convince her Editor to finally let her write the more political stories she'd always wanted to work on the onscreen Narrative of these women follows the classic heroes Journey we see them answer the call of opportunity and prove themselves worthy of the final reward thanks to their ability to accomplish even the most impossible tasks no matter how many times they get derailed through and sheer determination

they always manage to get back on track and hit the next Milestone as if nothing happened and if they fail in material terms they still learn a lesson or have an epiphany about who they are and what they want in life so they're still moving to the next level in terms of personal growth what I'm getting at is that this type of media offers the viewer a very uniform and satisfying picture of Life as a straight line dotted with milestones at regular intervals Milestones which can be achieved through nothing other than the individual's hard work

I found a bunch of Articles claiming to analyze the smart girl Trope as it pertains to characters like Rory Gilmore Alex dumpy and Spencer Hastings which all turned out to be inspired by this one video from the YouTube channel the take but one of them does highlight the fact that the TV smart girl is very much a romcom career woman in the making and I would go as far as saying that there is no substantial change in the narrative Arc of these two archetypes these characters although older than Rory are still living the same life

that Rory and other onscreen straight A students lived a life in which there are clear-cut steps that a person can take in order to achieve success and in which every period of hard work gets rewarded except instead of progressing to the next stage of your education you climb one step further on the career ladder and instead of getting praise from your teachers you get a raise from your employer unfortunately for all of us uh that's just not how life works you may have noticed by now that I seem to be speaking exclusively about women which

is in part because I'm a woman and this is a channel where I talk about my opinions about topics that I care about so my content will inevitably contain all of my biases and I think that's fine that's why the channel is called according to Alina and not indisputable truths about everything that has ever existed but it's also because I think that Milestone culture let's call it has a larger impact on women than it does on men we don't see that many narratives about men trying to reach certain Milestones by a certain age in the

media for the simple reason that there are less societal pressures related to age when it comes to men men don't get socialized to worry about their biological clock or to see their 30s as an expiration date or as their last chance at a successful romantic life and to clarify to all five men who watch my channel I'm not arguing that men don't aspire to be in fulfilling relationships and start families and just be happy and experience companionship in fact the same related study found that the men surveyed felt a higher degree of pressure to achieve

life Milestones than the women who took part in the study it also found that members of the lgbtq plus Community felt a higher pressure to hit certain Milestones by a certain age than their straight counterparts so I think it's safe to say that everyone in the 24 to 38 age group across gender identities and sexual orientations is equally stressed out about this not that it was a competition anyway but for the purpose of this video which is mainly discussing the role of the media that we grew up with in our feeling behind in life I'm

focusing more on women because sadly lgbtq people weren't hugely represented in the media at the time and as for men there is really no such thing as a small town guy trying to make it big in the city Trope or a high-powered career Guy having to choose between his family and his career and I presume that's why you don't see men making videos like starting over in my late 20s as if that's the end of their life basically you don't need me to tell you that our society is still very much a patriarchal society and

although some progress has been made when it comes to women's rights and opportunities most employers still put women in a position where they feel like they have to choose between their professional lives and motherhood for example and because having a fulfilling career as the parent who does most of the child care is basically unheard of many women feel like they have to accomplish as much as possible before starting a family if that's something that they want to do and because being a parent is such an all-encompassing experience or so I've heard this doesn't just apply

to people's professional lives there is a certain pressure for people in their 20s and their early 30s to have as many experiences as possible before starting a family to travel as much as possible read as much as possible party as much as possible work on their physical fitness and their mental health as much as possible all while also putting in as many hours as possible at work and get to a place where they're financially stable the result of all this is a huge expectation that people have of their 20s where we're told that this one

decade is somehow supposed to be the most fun you've ever had and the time when you make all of your youthful mistakes but also the time where you fully grow into yourself get to know yourself and become the best and most mindful person than you can be we now know that we don't lose neuroplasticity in the way that those BuzzFeed type articles telling you that you can't learn anything new after 27 would want you to believe but the narrative that we should have X amount of things figured out by 30 persists and it seems to

have moved from traditional media onto social media where we constantly get bombarded with these types of infographic and inspirational quotes telling us which habits we should have given up by 25 and how much money we should have saved by 30 and what kind of people we should have in our lives by 35 and what kind of mistakes we shouldn't be making anymore by whatever age the way that we romanticize our 20s in particular has been a topic of discussion online for some years now not even Emily whose content I love made a video about it

a couple of months ago and people have made a lot of great observations specifically about unrealistic media portrayals of what a person's 30s should look like things like you should have a huge and solid friend group that you should be going to Fabulous parties every weekend that you should be going on dates all the time and that you would already know exactly what career you wanted to be in and would be working your way up to your dream job have all been heavily criticized as aspirational at best but one thing that I wish people talked

about more is that the people who are now in this age group between their late 20s and their late 30s so Millennials grew up watching movies and TV series that were written and produced before the 20072 2008 financial crisis so they've internalized p Trails of what their 20s and 30s should look like that no longer exist they're not achievable anymore not in this economy and I should also point out that the majority of the smart girl Career Girl characters that we see in this type of media are also white able-bodied and most of the time

middle or upper middle class Rory Gilmore being a perfect example of this in those first few seasons she's so likable that it takes us a minute to understand that she's not exactly one of us I will say that in the Gilmore Girls reboot the writers do try to address the socioeconomic shift Rory's character is very much grappling with the changes that the media landscape specifically has been undergoing in the age of social media and the show seems to hint at the fact that making a living as a writer is increasingly difficult and that journalism is

becoming a precarious career even for people as well connected as Rory and that storyline continues to be a reality today there have been recently a lot of conversations about the death of Legacy Media and especially the death of independent publishing and the discussion online is not limited to that a lot of people are talking more generally about how the job market has changed over the past 15 years this one woman for example went viral after she posted a Tik Tok where she is walking around New York City handing out CVS not even for jobs in

the media or other creative industries that are known to be more more precarious and this is just one example Tik Tok is full of people sharing how difficult it has been to build a sustainable career in any field not just in the so-called passion Industries and not being able to secure a steady and sufficient income has priced people out of other life Milestones as well a while ago I saw somebody question whether the Gen Z slant towards puritanism isn't so much a sign of societal change as simply a consequence of the fact that they were

priced out of Hedonism basically it's too expensive to get drunk and high all the time and I wonder if a similar argument can be made for Millennials being priced out of adulthood are we behind in Life or do we just feel like that because we have been priced out of the traditional markers of what makes a person into an adult like buying a house or being able to take somebody you like on a very expensive date or on a holiday having a big wedding having a family with more than just two people in it is

it possible that Millennials and older genz are not just infantilizing themselves but they feel like adults were adultier when we were kids in the '90s and 2000s simply because adults could afford to do adult things back then I don't have the answer to that by the way sadly and I also unfortunately don't know how to stop feeling behind in life but the reason I felt like I wanted to add to this on ongoing conversation online is because a lot of the people in the selfhelp space particularly who feel called upon to give advice seem to

fully neglect the way that the media that we consume affects us and the socioeconomic circumstances of the people who talk about feeling behind in life don't compare yourself to other people is pretty shallow advice I individually don't have the answers but I do believe that having these convers ations can be useful and if any of you have felt behind in life and then managed to work through that do share with everybody else in the comments