At 20, she already has a spreadsheet for her life.
University deadlines. Internship applications. Courses to take. Skills to learn. Money to save. Books to read. Jobs to apply for. Even the weekends have a purpose.
She ticks one thing off and adds two more.
She is doing what ambitious young people are repeatedly told to do: prepare early, work hard, stay healthy, build experience, keep learning and make herself employable.
She has barely begun her adult life.
And somehow, she already feels behind.
That may be one of the defining contradictions of being young today. You are still supposed to be discovering who you are, yet almost everything around you asks what you have achieved.
And there is always someone who appears to have achieved more.
Open your phone and someone your age has launched a company. Another has joined a global firm. Someone else is studying abroad, learning three languages, running before sunrise and building a personal brand before 25.
Exceptional lives have always existed. What has changed is how often we see them.
The result is subtle but powerful: exceptional achievement begins to look ordinary, while an ordinary life can begin to feel inadequate.
A university degree may no longer seem sufficient without internships, certificates, technical skills and something impressive on the side. A hobby cannot simply be enjoyable; perhaps it should become content, a business, a portfolio or at least evidence of self-improvement.
Even rest has acquired a return on investment. We “recharge” so that we can come back more productive.
When did simply living become such an inefficient use of time?
Some of this pressure is not imaginary. Young people are entering competitive labour markets in which credentials multiply quickly and technology is reshaping what employers expect from entry-level workers. The instinct to acquire another skill, another qualification or another line on a CV can therefore feel less like ambition than insurance.
That is what makes the optimization culture so difficult to escape: much of it is rational.
But rational behaviour can still produce an irrational life.
Technology has deepened the contradiction. Artificial intelligence can now write, research, organise, summarise and automate tasks that once consumed hours. For decades, technological progress has promised to give people back their time.
Yet the time saved rarely stays empty.
Instead, expectations expand.
If a task that once required three hours now takes one, the reward is not necessarily two free hours. It may simply be two more tasks.
Another course. Another application. Another project. Another goal.
We built machines to save time, then filled the saved time with more work.
Perhaps the problem was never simply that we lacked enough hours. Perhaps we have lost the idea that some hours do not need to produce anything at all.
Ambition is not the enemy.
There is satisfaction in becoming better at something. There is dignity in hard work, excitement in building a career and genuine pleasure in mastering a skill. Young people should be free to want difficult things and pursue them seriously.
But there is a difference between wanting to grow and believing that you must constantly improve merely to remain competitive, visible or worthy of attention.
The latter has no finish line.
There will always be someone richer, fitter, more qualified, better connected or apparently further ahead. Digital life makes those comparisons available almost without limit.
And increasingly, nearly every part of the self can be measured.
Work becomes productivity.
Exercise becomes performance.
Sleep becomes data.
Friends become networks.
Interests become content.
Experience becomes a CV.
Personality becomes a brand.
The spreadsheet is no longer merely a spreadsheet.
It is a way of thinking about life.
Perhaps that is the deeper shift: young people are increasingly encouraged to manage themselves as if they were permanently underperforming companies — acquiring skills, improving metrics, expanding networks and continuously demonstrating growth.
Companies are expected to optimise.
Human beings may need something different.
The more difficult ambition, then, may be learning where improvement should end.
A successful life might still include working hard, becoming excellent at something and earning well. But it might also include sitting with friends without documenting it, reading something that will never improve a career, walking without counting the steps, making something nobody will see or spending an evening doing something that achieves absolutely nothing.
No audience.
No certificate.
No measurable return.
No optimization.
Just a life.
The 20-year-old can keep her spreadsheet. She can chase the internship, learn the skills, build the career and want more from herself.
But perhaps she does not have to turn every unoccupied hour into evidence that she is moving forward.
Somewhere between becoming better and becoming more, we may have forgotten a simpler question:
What if being alive does not always have to count as progress?
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