Summer is meant to be a time of relaxation, a time when things slow down and we have the opportunity to better appreciate the world around us, the little things that make life worth living.

But for many people our age, summer can be a time of anxiety.

Much of this anxiety is found online.

Social scientists have now demonstrated that spending too much time on Facebook or other social media can be harmful.

We wind up comparing our lives to those of our friends, even though many of them only post the cool stuff that happens to them, and we wonder if we come up short.

We may feel our friends are “getting ahead” faster than we are – whether that is a great job, a new partner or marriage, or a new place to live.

Students and recent graduates are continuously told that we need to be locking down jobs or internships in our chosen field (or that we should get out of our field and opt for a more lucrative one) yesterday, and career websites warn that if you have not started your career in earnest by your mid-twenties, you will fall far behind. Feel pressured yet?

Many of us feel like we are not or will not ever get to “where we are supposed

to be.”

But there is no such thing. We made it up. It is a social illusion that drives our economy and stresses our minds.

All we really know from childhood through the last years of our formal education is structure, but life after college is not structured. It is up to you. You decide. Well, mostly.

I say mostly because there are, of course, certain financial, societal and environmental conditions that can constrain your choices, but that is the key word here: choice. You get to choose how you approach the rest of your life.

This can be scary. Many of us are just beginning to figure out who we are and what kind of life we want to lead.

There is no user manual here. We can learn from our elders, but the reality is that many of them still have not “figured it out,” if there even is anything to figure out.

One of the most guarded secrets in life is that most people at any age are basically just “winging it.”

Life does not respond well to planning, and there is no one person who has an authoritative account of and prescription for a good life. A lot of this we just make up as we go along.

It is important to develop your professional capacities and pursue your career dreams, and I am sure that parents and career consultants mean well. But the reality is that a lot of this talk can make us feel excessively anxious and afraid, especially given the rise of mental health conditions in our age demographic.

This is tragic. At our age, we should feel empowered to chart our own unique path in life – a path we make, as is sometimes said, by walking it.

Life is not a race, despite what our economic sensibilities dictate.

Society does a disservice to young people – really, all people – by fostering a culture in which we spend many of our waking hours doing things that do not contribute to a meaningful life, but to a life of constant unceasing chasing.

This is precisely the problem: we are not told enough to pursue a meaningful life. We are only encouraged to find a “happy” one. This is terrible advice. Happiness is great, but it is a feeling, and often a fleeting one.

More importantly, it is not, on balance, something we should strive for, but something that, when possessed, indicates that we have found the thing that does matter: meaning.

Did we leave the earth a better place than when we found it? Did we help people? Did we create a grand work of art, care for people in need, alleviate suffering, or be the kind of people that make, as the saying goes, the change we wish to see in the world?

These questions – and ones similar – are those that matter. Not whether we measure up to some arbitrary social metric.

Instead of telling us to be concerned about how other people look, what they are wearing, and what they have accomplished professionally and financially, society should be sending a better message: work on ourselves, for our own intrinsic worth.

We should be encouraged by our elders to build a strong and enduring sense of internal, not external, validation – confident in who we are, that we matter, and that we have something to give to the world.

Robert F. Kennedy, my personal hero, once said that, “We will find neither national purpose nor personal satisfaction in a mere continuation of economic progress, in an endless amassing of worldly goods…the gross national product measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”

Let us get the fundamentals right first. Then, if we so choose, we can revisit the rest.