Why You Feel Behind in Life and How to Stop 

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Travis makes up for height with hair. It’s an efficient system

me addicted to youtube but cut all other social media: i see this as an absolute win

i could see why gratitude journals would help. when i’m really angry and stuck in it i force myself to repeat gratitudes until i’m not angry anymore. i hate it, it is very very effective.

Thanks, I really needed this video

“You are where you are supposed to be.” I trained myself to remember this saying when I start to get lost in negative self-comparison thoughts and feelings, as well as trying to remember that in due time, with enough persistence and determination and effort, our circumstance(s) in life wilp shift, hopefully towards the way we want it to be. Circumstances also tend to shape our behavior and thoughts which is something I learned in Psychology. So, please keep on clinging on to your intrinsic and extrinsic motivations so that when you experience a change in circumstance(s), you’ll be able to act accordingly:) Just my thoughts and avoid burnout

YAY!!! Your first sponsorship!...maybe I'm feeling behind your success...how ironic and yeah, Instagram is my biggest source of "comparison fatigue". The phrase "comparison is the thief of joy" feels so true!

Honestly, working on things just because I want to do them is the best advice I have been given. It feels so freeing to have goals in something that won't be for a resume or used in an interview.

I so need this right now!!

Commenting for the algorithm. It’s amazing that videos of this quality don’t get more views. This is just really outstanding content

Thank you for this video. As a 1st generation American, I often felt Behind in Life based off the unrealistic expectations my parents set. This will be a topic I plan to share in a future video

I don't feel behind other people, just myself, like the feeling of being behind in school or in your career. I feel good when I see someone being genuinely happy in life and I feel kind of depressed when I see someone faking it and turning their exotic holiday into a job.

I love that you brought up intrinsic and extrinsic motivations! I'm a fitness instructor, and I teach courses to new fitness instructors in the making, and this is one of the most important things we teach/learn in our work.

You’ve laid out some really great CBT techniques, like gratitude journaling. Your channel is one of my favourites,btw!

I remember a guy in year 8 who had the same name as me. Outperformed me in everything, and I was really envious. He then decided to become a jock, and that fixed things

Sponsored by like the biggest education youtube channel? Congrats man

I clicked SO FAST.

I love how you always have topics I never thought about but at the same time are so relevant for me!

My therapist recommended me to start gratitude journaling a year ago and I have been consistent since then. Writing 5 things that I am grateful about to myself and the world at large has helped me become less biased. Ps- I saw John green in the second list and I just smiled to myself. Love that you have his support:')

Genius! 👩‍🍳 😚 Ps “phenomena” is plural. “phenomenon” is singular.

6:37 The Problem Is I Never Have The Motivation To Do The Things I Most Enjoy, Except For Listening To Music.

Good lord I love this channel. I found myself cheering when you elicited the pitfalls of how we trap ourselves in our own comparative thoughts. Thank you for what you do.

You have no idea how great of a video this is. Just started medschool and i feel so insufficient. Great work!

Words to live by Also, I would love to see a video on "loneliness and diet." I know I feel these ones hard

Can you link the study you used for the effect of social media on mental health. I'd love to read it. Great video you really hit this one out of the park.

RU-vidr telling me watching youtube is beneficial for my well being I call bias

This is most excellent and helpful. I was struggling to find a cohesive and accessible way to give information on the downside of social media to my young person. This will do nicely. Thanks so much!

Top notch video and discussion about an important problem that we're facing!

Great video. Really insightful.

John Green mentioned in one of his videos the gratitude journal he uses. May be time to get one now that I've seen this video as well!

fortunately as an introvert being a celebrity would be a living nightmare so I don't really want to measure my life by their yardstick

I like this channel. And I like you. Looking forward to see it growing.

As someone who doesn't have instagram I think it can be realy challenging It feels like living under a rock... always behind on new info and such 😂

Consider this: According to the Social Identity Theory, belonging to a group is a crucial part of an individual’s life. The group often works as an additional source for individual’s self-esteem. *← This is VERY important.* In psychology, the term self-esteem is used to describe a person's overall subjective sense of personal worth or value - _what one ascribes to themselves._ Dignity, on the other hand, is what the group _ascribes to the individual_ in terms of the groups (Culture/Tribes) traditional social values set. Dignity reinforces positive self-esteem. Belonging to the group, in general, helps a person to acquire the sense of the social identity, which is a sense of belonging with others. People tend to form a group based on the proximity to familiar physical appearance or the shared/common interests and values. In the case of Social Media, it is suggested that people often feel threatened when they are around unfamiliar individuals with a different value system. Thus us Humans gather into comfortable groupings in order to "fit in" and earn "dignity". An outside group (Culture/Tribe ... "shorter people??") inherently represents a defacto challenge to an incumbent group. Alternate traditions and customs could force a comparison. To avoid this comparison, which could expose weaknesses or vulnerabilities - which in turn could discount the perceived value of the group - group members tend to respond negatively towards the out-group. This is, at its core, a Human defense mechanism when confronted with the potential of both a loss of self-esteem, and a resultant loss of dignity from the group. Social media exploits this Human attribute; The group (Tribe) has developed a value set and worldviews - based on social pecking order - over scores of generations, that is ingrained into the behavior patterns of its members. In general, Western groups evolved an acute fear of scarcity. Scarcity of food and other basic needs (AKA: lack of "wealth"). Former European aristocracies were never predicated upon overabundance; on the contrary, they were always predicated upon scarcity - which was manipulated by the ruling *Caste.* In particular, U.S. culture is even more paranoid. We tend to seek grotesque overabundance in an effort to compensate for our - now unfounded - indoctrinated fears of potential scarcity. What I submit you are observing, and we all are prone to, is the perceived need to horde what we now consider "wealth". When we compound the Human behavior of social competition (which is effectively a survival of the species approach to qualified mating), we wind up with very exploitable triggers that make us want to showcase an illusion of wealth accumulation to our other group (Tribe) members. A threshold so high now, as to be unobtainable by 99.99% of group members, yet we all "feel" the need to aspire to this ever moving goalpost. Social media only magnifies our basic Human behavior. BTW, I'm now merged past overall Tribe - and on into the internal Human behavioral structural architecture of Tribe: Caste.

This is excellent Travis!

Great video, a really important topic!

OMG this helps SO much!!!!! Thanks 💓

Thanks for making this video!

If you're competitive about your height after you've stopped growing, what you feel is more precisely "beneath" rather than "behind". Remind yourself that your feet reach the ground and don't worry about it.

Good analysis!

Great video.

Great video travis 👌

very engaging. Yes, such high levels of audience engagement, I was engaged

Loving this content

can you read my mind? lots of friends are being promoted atm and i keep feeling inadequate :'(

It can be really hard to distinguish intrinsic and extrinsic goals. For instance I love cycling up hills and that becomes easier the less I weigh. But looking lean is also something society wants me to achieve. This can be very confusing.

Thank you!

I relate to the height thing 😅

Probably 90% of my to-do list is made up of goals created by intrinsic motivations. I've also been keeping my life in mind whenever I see somebody else do something "better" than me. Each person measures success differently, but more than that, will have different types of success in life. Take, for example, another science-focused RU-vidr (e.g. Isaac Arthur or Joe Scott). Either by themselves or with a team, they could put out a video per week. Their success might be described as a continuous reach to more and more people they can help educate, and thus they can grow and have grown relatively quickly. For me, it's reaching a small number of people (I'm talking *really* small) and growing that gradually over time, and I know I'll be doing this for a while because I'm not on a particularly tight schedule. And that allows me to focus more time on each video, so I can make the best documentary-type video I can. The end outcome might be similar, but the path we each take to get there is very different. Thinking of things in those terms--for anything, really--helps a lot, because it requires perspective to understand: it can't exclude perspective. It's something I suggest other people do as well.

I just subscribed

perhaps the reasons Kings and Gods were so popular back in the day, was that you only knew like 100 so people who often were in similar circumstances to you, and the only people you knew of that wasn't from that background, were the Kings and Gods that you saw pictures and heard stories of. Those being your only reference to a person you was better than the other people you knew, would be even greater in comparison. Now we have access to knowledge and paresocial relations with not only the God and Kings people tell you about, but every entrepreneur, CEO, and even your friends framed in a light that glorifies them beyond reality, and so stories about Kings and Gods seem mild.

Can you link to the study you referenced when talking about how detrimental social media is (where youtube was the only positive one)?

This vid and channel are excellent. You think young people feel behind in life, wait till you're older than most celebrities. :/

Yeahhhhh new video!

cool vid bro

3:40 - do you have a source for mental health declining? Like, I expect COVID has had a negative impact, but is this a trend over a longer time period? This seems like this could be one of those ideas that is widely accepted as true, even though it turns out not to be the case once you look more closely (similar to the idea that there's been a big increase in loneliness over the past few years: if you look at the best measures we have of loneliness, there's not enough evidence to conclude it's getting worse - if anything, there's some weak evidence to suggest loneliness is actually decreasing). Thanks for this video - the connection between Dunbar's number and the people we choose to compare ourselves to was a neat insight!

439 up votes and 0 down votes. That's remarkable!

Can you link to the study for social media and mental health?

You should have trigger warned the flashing lights that started at approx 1:29

bussy

Helpful Tangent eh?

It feels weird to consider RU-vid social media, but I guess it fits. There are comments, which obviously I take part in-- though half the time I only do so bc I know it helps small creators be favored by The Almighty Algorithm. On topic of the video... I've felt behind since I was a kid, when I wanted to be a history- making child genius. Since then I've lowered my standards repeatedly, and... my autistic ass still can't meet them. I'm working on getting my shit together, and using an app that actually seems promising for the first time, so like-- I'm not trying to be a downer here. Just that shit sucks when you're not even near the average/ mean or median audience.

[ Insert insightful comments]

John Green supports you on Patreon? sick

*This is sugar

👍🏼

Don’t be another brick in the wall

i feel like the videos content has gotten a lot better but the editing is kinda worse...

Small correction at 00:23 "this is a strange, yet common _phenomenon."_ Probably just misspoke, but just in case. EDIT: 5:39 Oh, shit, I'm so sorry... :')