The intern is behind. She is twenty-three and certain that the serious people her age already have equity and an audience. The founder she admires is behind too, because he is thirty-six now and the lists of people who matter keep getting younger. The man at the top of those lists sold his company last spring and feels further behind than either of them, since a former classmate just raised a fund ten times the size of his exit. Somewhere above all three of them there should be a person who finally feels ahead. No one has ever managed to interview him. He doesn’t exist.
Age doesn’t resolve it either. The retiree is behind on the life she kept postponing. The student is behind on a career that hasn’t begun. Ask around honestly and nearly everyone, at every altitude, will admit to the same quiet arithmetic running in the background, the sense of a schedule somewhere that they have fallen off of.
Which is the strange part. A feeling is supposed to carry information. Hunger means eat, pain …