There is a peculiar humiliation to being twenty-nine and having nothing particularly wrong with your life.
You have a job. You pay your bills. You have friends, interests, perhaps a relationship that makes you happy. In all ways that matter, your life is not falling apart.
Then a college acquaintance announces his engagement, another buys a flat, and a third becomes a vice president at a company you have never heard of. By evening, you have somehow arrived at the conclusion that your own life requires urgent correction.
Why Do We Let Others’ Achievements
Determine Our Own?
Psychologist Leon Festinger’s Social Comparison Theory (1954) offers an explanation. When objective standards for evaluating ourselves are unclear, we turn to other people for reference points. Their achievements become evidence of where we stand, even when their circumstances, priorities and starting points bear little resemblance to our own.
Social media makes this process relentless. We see the promotion without the years of uncertainty, the wedding without the private realities of the relationship, the new home without the financial compromises. We compare our entire lives with carefully selected fragments of someone else’s, then treat the resulting inadequacy as an objective assessment. The more people we observe, the more standards we acquire.
The Tyranny of ‘Log Kya Kahenge?’
The obsession with social approval did not begin online. In India, ‘log kya kahenge?’ has long served as a remarkably effective instrument of social regulation. It influences what we study, where we work, whom we marry and what kind of life we consider acceptable.
Growing up, the expectations were familiar. Women were expected to be educated, but not at the expense of family life. Men were expected to be successful, financially secure and capable of providing. Women were judged on how successfully they balanced ambition with sacrifice. Men were judged on how convincingly they embodied success, stability and provision.
The consequences were unequal, but the underlying bargain was familiar: you are free to make your own choices, provided those choices do not inconvenience the society that has already made them for you.
The New Generation Has
Challenged These Expectations
The younger generation has fought for greater agency over their life. Yet freedom from one set of rules does not necessarily mean freedom from the need for approval. Society no longer needs to explicitly forbid a choice to make us question it. The fear of being judged can do the work for it.
A thirty-two-year-old who is unmarried, a professional who chooses a less lucrative career, or a couple that does not want children can find themselves defending perfectly legitimate decisions simply because they deviate from the expected script. The contradiction is difficult to ignore.
From Verona’s Desk: Who Decides
What a Good Life Looks Like?
Few decisions expose the tension between personal desire and social approval quite like choosing a life partner.
Marriage is still frequently treated as evidence of desirability, maturity and social standing. The questions surrounding it rarely end with whether two people are happy together. Is the person sufficiently accomplished? Does their family meet the expected standard? Is the match appropriate for someone with your education, income and background?
The problem is not that these considerations are irrelevant. Financial stability, education, family circumstances and shared expectations can all matter enormously in a marriage. The problem is treating them as sufficient evidence of compatibility.
A person can meet every social criterion for a good match and still be entirely wrong for the life you want to build. Choosing a partner therefore requires more than identifying someone who satisfies the expectations of a community. It requires knowing which expectations are genuinely your own, which compromises you can live with, and which parts of your identity you are unwilling to surrender for the sake of approval.
Log kya kahenge? may always have an answer. The more important question is whether the people asking it will have to live with the consequences of your decision.
