There was a time, not long ago in historical terms, when adulthood followed a legible sequence. Education led somewhere. Consistent work promised financial security. Effort increased the probability of certain outcomes: a home, a degree of permanence, a life that gradually took on recognizable, mapped out shape.
Naturally, the sequence was never guaranteed. But it was within reach.
Today, many people are exerting equal (and often greater) effort while finding that the traditional markers of ‘I’ve made it’ become scarcer. Housing has become less attainable across developed world despite rising levels of education. Entire professional sectors are being reshaped or phased out. Geographic mobility creates opportunity while simultaneously weakening one’s sense of continuity – relationships, professional identity, and place become less anchored. Conditions once assumed to be durable increasingly require ongoing negotiation.
In psychotherapy practice, these themes often emerge not as abstract reflections, but as lived psychological tension – particularly among capable adults who outwardly function well yet struggle to locate a stable sense of being ‘enough’.
When culturally shared milestones become near obsolete, something else begins to shift on an individual level: the feeling of being ‘enough’ becomes harder to locate.
And without ‘enoughness’, identity struggles to settle. Questions about adequacy, identity, and psychological consolidation are explored further in my clinical approach.
Limits as Psychological Infrastructure
Limits are commonly understood as constraints – restrictions on movement or choice. Psychologically, their function is closer to organization.
In this context, a limit helps determine where effort can pause and where evaluation can reasonably stop. It allows the nervous system to register that a task has, for now, been completed.
And the sense of completion is not trivial. Self-regulation research suggests that when individuals experience a persistent gap between their current position and internal standards, the discrepancy can become psychologically burdensome, particularly if progress feels uncertain.
At a developmental level, identity typically forms through repeated participation in roles that remain stable long enough to be internalized. The point is well noted by narrative psychologists have observed that coherence – the sense that one’s life is accumulating rather than scattering – depends partly on the presence of such stabilizing structures.
One’s sense of self cannot stabilize inside an experience that never concludes.
Freedom alone does not organize identity. Decisions, commitments, and relative consistency provide the conditions within which a person can begin to recognize a life as their own.
Social Acceleration
Many contemporary societies are undergoing a sustained increase in the pace of technological change, social transformation, and of everyday life.
Work is less geographically anchored. Careers are less linear. Social environments are more permeable. Change itself has become routine. Time feels compressed – a phenomenon sociologist Hartmut Rosa describes as social acceleration, in which the pace of life increases without a parallel deepening of meaning.
In such conditions, individuals are increasingly required to generate internally what external structures once provided: criteria for sufficiency, points of pause, and boundaries around striving.
This expansion of choice is often described as freedom. Psychologically, it also introduces additional regulatory work. Someone must decide when something is “enough,” even when the surrounding environment offers few signals that it is. In an international city like Porto, where many adults are building lives across languages and cultural frameworks, this negotiation often becomes especially visible.
Expectations That Outlived Their Conditions
Meanwhile, cultural expectations, however, often lag behind the realities of living in 2026.
Many adults were raised on a relatively stable formula: work diligently, pursue education, remain disciplined, and stability and even prosperity will follow. In numerous regions, that equation has become less predictive.
Yet the expectation remains psychologically active, sometimes making up part of cognitive schemes, the frameworks that we keep referring to, to navigate the outside world.
More often than not, when anticipated outcomes fail to materialize, it almost logically follows to attribute it to a personal miscalculation. This discrepancy can have some emotional consequences, sometimes not felt directly. This kind of experience can take many shapes: it can be waves of anxious thoughts, or extra sleepiness, or unsettling dreams, or physical symptoms. But whatever it is, it is often seen as the result of an individual shortcoming rather than as a defensive response to external conditions.
When environments reward constant optimization, the experience of “enough” becomes psychologically harder to access – even for objectively successful individuals.
The difficulty is not always failure.
Sometimes it is the absence of a recognizable finish line.
(Part 2 will follow shortly)
Selected References
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- Carver, C. S., & Scheier, M. F. (1998). On the Self-Regulation of Behavior. Cambridge University Press.
- Crocker, J., & Wolfe, C. T. (2001). Contingencies of self-worth. Psychological Review, 108(3), 593–623.
- Curran, T., & Hill, A. P. (2019). Perfectionism is increasing over time: A meta-analysis of birth cohort differences from 1989 to 2016. Psychological Bulletin, 145(4), 410–429.
- Dell’Acqua, F., McFowland III, E., Mollick, E. R., Lifshitz-Assaf, H., Kellogg, K., Rajendran, S., et al. (2023). Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier: Field Experimental Evidence of the Effects of AI on Knowledge Worker Productivity and Quality. Harvard Business School Working Paper.
- Hickman, C., Marks, E., Pihkala, P., Clayton, S., Lewandowski, R. E., Mayall, E. E., et al. (2021). Climate anxiety in children and young people and their beliefs about government responses to climate change: A global survey. The Lancet Planetary Health, 5(12), e863–e873.
- Keles, B., McCrae, N., & Grealish, A. (2020). A systematic review: The influence of social media on depression, anxiety and psychological distress in adolescents. International Journal of Adolescence and Youth, 25(1), 79–93.
- Martela, F., & Steger, M. F. (2016). The three meanings of meaning in life: Distinguishing coherence, purpose, and significance. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 11(5), 531–545.
- McAdams, D. P. (2001). The psychology of life stories. Review of General Psychology, 5(2), 100–122.
- OECD. (2023). Confronting the cost-of-living and housing crisis in cities. OECD Publishing.
- Rosa, H. (2013). Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity. Columbia University Press.
- Schwartz, B., Ward, A., Monterosso, J., Lyubomirsky, S., White, K., & Lehman, D. R. (2002). Maximizing versus satisficing: Happiness is a matter of choice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(5), 1178–1197.
