Lately I've had the feeling that I'm the last person everywhere.

The last friend to figure things out. The last designer to find their place. The last entrepreneur to build something worth talking about.

It isn't really jealousy. At least I don't think it is.

It's something stranger than that.

A friend messages to say they've settled into a new city. Someone else gets promoted. Another person joins a company you've admired for years. You open LinkedIn and it feels like everyone your age has reached some destination while you're still looking at the map.

The strange thing is that none of these people are doing anything wrong. They're not showing off. They're simply living their lives. Yet every success story feels like evidence that you're late.

I think part of the problem is that we're exposed to too many timelines.

A hundred years ago you compared yourself to a handful of people in your town. Today you're comparing yourself to the most successful designer in Bengaluru, the fastest-growing founder in San Francisco, the engineer who got hired at their dream company, and the creator whose work suddenly went viral.

The result is an illusion that everyone is ahead.

But whenever I look closely at the people I admire, I notice something interesting.

Most of their stories took much longer than I imagined.

There were years nobody saw. Years of wandering. Years of failed ideas. Years of doing work that didn't immediately lead anywhere.

We tend to compare our behind-the-scenes footage with someone else's highlight reel and then wonder why the comparison feels unfair.

Maybe being late isn't actually the problem.

Maybe the problem is believing there is a schedule.

Life isn't one race with a shared finish line. A designer, a founder, an artist and a scientist are not even playing the same game, let alone competing against each other.

The moment you stop measuring your progress against someone else's timeline, you start noticing things comparison tends to hide.

The skills you've built.

The mistakes you've survived.

The small victories that never make it onto social media.

The person you've quietly become.

What I'm going to do about it

I've spent enough time wondering whether I'm behind.

For the next year, I want to focus less on where other people are and more on building the things that matter to me.

The first is building a portfolio that is impossible to ignore. Not because it will get me a job, but because it will become a clear expression of the kind of designer I want to be. I want it to reflect my interests honestly: complex systems, motorcycles, physical products, technology, and the space where engineering and design meet.

The second is continuing to publish my thoughts. The internet is full of finished work but far less documentation of how people think. Writing has become a way of understanding what I believe, and a year from now I want a record of the ideas that shaped me, even if some of them turn out to be wrong.

The third is shipping real things into the world. Not concepts. Not plans. Real things. Prototypes, products, experiments, however small they might be. A product that exists teaches more than a hundred ideas that never leave a sketchbook.

Maybe none of this will make me feel ahead.

Maybe that's not the point.

A year from now, I don't want to be known as the person who spent all their time comparing timelines. I want to be the person who kept building, even when the path wasn't obvious.

Because eventually, the only timeline that matters is the one you're creating yourself.