Is Everyone Secretly Wasting Their Youth or Are We Just Overthinking It

You are sitting in a crowded metro coach traveling back from campus, scrolling through your social feeds, and instant panic hits your line. Someone just landed a high-end corporate internship, another classmate is traveling to a premium holiday spot, and a junior from your university department just launched an online side hustle. Suddenly, you look at your own day—filled with basic college lectures, messy assignment files, and simple hostel food—and you feel like you are completely wasting the best years of your life.

We put this burning question out to the student crowd on Boomm: “Do you ever feel like you're wasting your 20s? 😔” with choices “Sometimes 😶” and “Rarely 🙂”.

The collective feedback shows that almost every single college student is silently fighting this exact timeline panic. This constant fear of lagging behind is the core focus we track inside The Lifestyle Choices Review, where we unpack the modern campus mind. This constant second-guessing is what triggers the instant self-doubt we break down in The Quickest Trap for Your Self Esteem, where a quick glance at someone else's highlight reel destroys your mood.

One final-year Delhi University student shared: "I feel like if I am not working on a technical project or earning money every single hour of the day, I am failing. The pressure to be a young achiever is completely exhausting." The reality check we need to accept is that your early twenties are not a race to look settled. It is a messy, unscripted sandbox meant for discovering your actual capability. Are you running your own race or are you letting an app notification dictate your worth?