You could be ahead of 90% of your peers and still wake up feeling behind. If this sounds familiar, you’re probably exhibiting these behaviors that keep you trapped in a race that doesn’t even exist.

I’m sitting in a coffee shop in Singapore, watching a friend scroll through LinkedIn with the kind of frantic energy I recognize too well. She’s successful by any reasonable measure—runs her own consultancy, travels the world, has the kind of life others screenshot for vision boards. But all she can see are the gaps. The promotions she didn’t get five years ago. The opportunities that went to someone else. The phantom finish line that keeps moving just as she approaches it.

“I’m so behind,” she says, not for the first time today. It’s become her refrain, a mantra of inadequacy that no amount of external evidence can shake. I know because I spent a decade singing the same song.

The peculiar thing about feeling perpetually behind is how it persists regardless of actual circumstances. You could be ahead of 90% of your peers by every metric that matters, and still wake up with that gnawing sense that everyone else got the manual while you’re improvising. This feeling owned me for years—until I encountered Rudá Iandê’s teachings. His just-released book Laughing in the Face of Chaos distills a lifetime of shamanic wisdom into something revolutionary: a mechanism for seeing through the stories we mistake for reality. It’s this mechanism—the ability to recognize inherited narratives as optional rather than ordained—that finally freed me from the race I didn’t even realize I was running.

First, there’s the compulsive comparison to carefully curated highlights. We know intellectually that social media is everyone’s highlight reel, but people who feel perpetually behind consume these highlights like evidence in a case they’re building against themselves. They don’t just scroll; they study. Every success story becomes proof of their own inadequacy. Every announcement triggers a mental calculation: They’re younger than me. They started later. What’s wrong with me?

I used to do this with founder stories, reading about twenty-something unicorn creators while running my own successful companies. The logic was breathtaking in its selective cruelty. I’d dismiss my own achievements as luck while treating others’ success as proof of their inherent superiority. The hardest part of facing your shadow is admitting that sometimes we’re our own harshest prosecutors.

Then there’s the behavior I call “pre-emptive diminishing”—shrinking your accomplishments before anyone else can. People who feel behind have mastered the art of the qualifying statement. “I got promoted, but it’s just a small company.” “I finished the marathon, but my time was terrible.” “I started my business, but it’s nothing compared to…” They rush to minimize their wins, as if acknowledging them fully might invite cosmic punishment for hubris.

The thing is, this isn’t modesty. It’s a protective mechanism born from the terror of being seen as someone who doesn’t know their place in the imaginary hierarchy. What Rudá’s book reveals—through decades of working with thousands of people trapped in similar patterns—is how we mistake these inherited narratives for truth. The mechanism is simple but profound: once you see that “being behind” is just a story culture taught you to tell, you can choose to tell a different one.

Another behavior I recognize in myself and others who feel perpetually behind: the constant mental accounting of time lost. We become archaeologists of our own past, excavating every decision for evidence of wrong turns. If only I’d started investing at 25. If only I’d stayed in that job. If only I’d moved cities when I had the chance.

This temporal torture chamber serves no purpose except to reinforce the feeling of being behind. We treat our past selves like failed project managers who should have somehow predicted every future trend and opportunity. Last month, I caught myself calculating how much further along I’d be if I hadn’t spent five years on a failed startup in my thirties. Then I remembered: those five years taught me everything I know about resilience. But when you’re convinced you’re behind, even your teachers look like thieves who stole your time.

People who feel constantly behind also exhibit what I’ve come to recognize as “milestone hoarding”—the compulsive need to hit every marker by a certain age or in a certain order. They carry mental lists of what should have happened by now: the career level, the relationship status, the financial benchmarks. Life becomes a series of expired deadlines.

I see this in how they talk about their lives, always in relation to these phantom timelines. “I should be married by now.” “I should have made director already.” “I should have bought a house.” Should according to whom? The question rarely gets asked because the timeline feels like natural law rather than cultural fiction.

The exhausting thing about milestone hoarding is how it makes every achievement feel hollow. Finally get the promotion? You’re still behind because it should have happened two years ago. Get married? You’re behind because your kids will be younger than everyone else’s at school reunions. The goalpost doesn’t just move—it multiplies, creating an infinite game where being successful feels empty because it’s never enough.

There’s also the behavior of future-tripping while the present slips by unnoticed. People who feel behind live in a constant state of projection, using today merely as a launchpad for calculating tomorrow’s deficits. They can tell you exactly where they need to be in five years to “catch up” but can’t tell you what they actually enjoyed about last week.

I spent years like this, treating the present as nothing more than a waystation to a future where I’d finally be enough. The irony that Rudá’s book illuminates through shamanic wisdom refined over decades is that this futurism is exactly what keeps us behind—not behind others, but behind ourselves, always living in tomorrow’s anxiety instead of today’s reality. The book doesn’t just diagnose this pattern; it provides the tools to break it through radical presence and embodied awareness.

Perhaps the most insidious behavior is the rejection of their own timing. People who feel perpetually behind have usually internalized someone else’s schedule so completely they can’t recognize their own rhythm. They force themselves into timelines that were never designed for their particular journey, then wonder why everything feels like such a struggle.

When you’re measuring the wrong things, even success feels like failure. But here’s what I’ve learned through Rudá’s teachings: the feeling of being behind isn’t about time or achievement. It’s about alignment. When you’re living someone else’s life, running someone else’s race, you’ll always feel behind because you’re not even on your own track.

The shift comes not from catching up but from stopping the race entirely. Not from achieving more but from questioning why these particular achievements matter. Not from moving faster but from asking: Whose schedule am I on, and do I want to be?

My friend finishes scrolling, sets down her phone with a sigh. “Maybe I need to work harder,” she says. But I know what she really needs—what we all need when caught in this trap. Not more effort but more consciousness. Not better strategies for winning the race but the courage to ask whether it’s even our race to run.

This is the gift of Laughing in the Face of Chaos—it doesn’t promise to help you catch up. Instead, it offers something far more radical: the recognition that “behind” and “ahead” are just stories we’ve agreed to believe. The book’s power lies not in providing new strategies for success but in dismantling the very framework that makes us feel perpetually insufficient. Through a blend of shamanic insight, psychological wisdom, and irreverent humor, Rudá shows how the cosmic joke is on us—we’re running a race that doesn’t exist, toward a finish line we drew ourselves.

The real question isn’t whether you’re behind or ahead. It’s whether you’re living your own life or performing in someone else’s play. Once you see that—really see it, not just intellectually but in your bones—the whole concept of being behind reveals itself as the fiction it always was. And that’s when life actually begins. Not when you catch up, but when you stop running.