Thinking differently about feeling left behind

Are we failing to keep up with an accelerating world? Or are we here to resist it?

This reflection exists both as a written essay and as a spoken conversation. The essay explores the ideas in depth; the video explores them in person.

Recently people in my therapy room are reporting a growing feeling that they’re falling behind what’s required of them, or falling behind the trajectory they expected for their life. Or simply, in brutal economic terms, falling behind.

Save for their commitment and ability to explore how our inevitable human suffering is showing up in their particular lives, I never imagine that people in therapy are especially different from people not-in-therapy. So, if visitor after visitor brings a particular feeling into the room, I suppose it’s a feeling that’s growing in the world at the moment.

At the end of a long day I take off my glasses, rub my eyes, and resonate with the feeling myself. I water my peace lily and my Boston fern – Thelma and Louise – and I move them by the window so they’ll get their share of tomorrow’s morning light. I close up the room, but the emotion follows me home: the feeling of a world accelerating beyond some terminal human velocity.

This is a signature emotion for 21st-century humans: to feel as if we’re hanging on by our fingernails, with rising costs and falling hopes, in a society racing into the unknowable.

How are we handling this difficult reality? One way is through a familiar social ritual: we joke about how grim things are and we gloss over our deeper inner disquiet, partly to reassure one another and partly to keep our own spirits up. You can witness this happening everywhere, from school gate pleasantries to football chants. West Ham United’s, for example, is an existential masterpiece:

“I’m forever blowing bubbles, Pretty bubbles in the air. They fly so high, Nearly reach the sky, Then like my dreams, They fade and die.”

I like human beings for this courtesy we extend one another – for this subtle practice of love that is small talk and crowd chants. But it comes at a human cost. When our days are full of people projecting a degree of resilience while internalising their panic, it can feel as if we personally, in these times of overwhelm, are getting left behind more quickly than others.

So, if you’re one of the great many people at the moment who are beating themselves up for failing to keep pace, please join me in noticing that the failure to keep up is increasingly becoming a universal condition of 21st-century life. Technology and capital have combined to create a world that is always moving just beyond our reach. It’s like a fast car that pulls up while we’re hitching, then accelerates away with laughter and a squeal of tyres before we can reach it – only to pull up again just far enough ahead to let our hopes rise.

Maybe we can try not to take it personally. As someone put it to me who lost their career to AI: “A good day is when I think: we’re all screwed. A bad day is when I think it’s just me.”

Why the fear of falling behind is so intense

The dread of getting left behind has deep existential roots.

For many of us there were early experiences of being bullied, dropped or excluded. It was a desperately lonely and destabilising experience.

All through the education system, we were left behind if we didn’t make the grade. And now the world of work might drop us in a heartbeat, and move on as if we never existed. Even our entertainment formats are about surviving the cut. The winners live on under studio lights, while the losers pack their bags.

What all of it foreshadows is that each of us, at the end of our life, will suffer our own final exclusion. The day will probably come when my therapy room plants will see tomorrow’s morning light, while I will not.

This deep human horror of getting left for dead: this is the raw nerve that our accelerating culture is pressing on. Our terror rises close to the surface. It becomes a constant baseline feeling that many of us carry now: a kind of emotional tinnitus, a piercing note of frightened disquiet that resonates in our chests, twists in our guts, and scatters our underlying existential anxiety into a hundred atomic fears: Am I enough? Am I too much? What am I not seeing? Do I look okay? Will I be picked?

Our mind is likely to fix on one such particular fear, because that is actually kinder than allowing us to experience the deeper anxiety. The mind, I think, is usually trying to help. It’s compassionate and wise even when – at first glance – it seems to be thinking unhelpfully. It works extremely hard to spare us from realities we’re not yet equipped to see. It will lift its veils and illusions as soon as our courage becomes equal to the unfiltered sight of our existence. But in the meantime all our obsessive worries in these times are not you and me being weird. They’re just us being human in a world we can’t possibly keep up with.

And so?

And so, practically, what can we do to feel better?

The first thing you may find useful is to reflect on whether you agree that we live in a time in which we’re being required to live faster than human beings can.

If you do, and if you’re noticing that what is necessary is starting to become separated from what is possible, then it will help to commit to the possible. I wish that committing to the possible didn’t feel like a radical position – but in 2026, here we are. Maybe you have to make compromises with the culture of acceleration, but perhaps you can make parts of your life into acts of human resistance.

Once we stop colluding with the idea that we should be more-than-human, we can begin to commit to being who we are. No one else was issued with your body, your ancestors, your life experiences, or your inner world. Human lives differ from one another as profoundly as tigers differ from sunsets. So: no one is getting ahead of you, and nor are you falling behind, in any sense that has meaning. You are carrying out the project of being human as well as anyone in history ever has.

So maybe give yourself some credit. Give yourself practical gifts. Give yourself five minutes to lie on the floor and do – as a friend brilliantly put it – “ever so slightly less than nothing”. Start with these little presents to yourself. Grind some coffee so it’s there for you in the morning, when you’re still too sleepy to get that kind of thing together. And when the morning comes, remember to thank yourself for the gift.

Humanity keeps small promises to itself. You’ll probably enjoy the walk you promised yourself with a friend. You’ll probably need the screen break you scheduled. Every time you keep a small promise to yourself you’re reinforcing your commitment to what you know to be humanly possible, over what the culture necessitates.

You may find that a certain loyalty to your humanity becomes an anchor in these accelerating times. And maybe you have other ways, equally useful, to anchor yourself (in which case, please consider sharing in the comments).

Either way, once we ourselves are anchored, it becomes possible to offer solidarity to – and receive solidarity from – other human beings. Love reconnects us. And if we’re all falling behind together, none of us are falling behind.