Time of Our Lives

Abstract

Drawing from interviews about lives that did not go as expected, the author argues that people reproduce inequality in friendship relationships by leaning into aspects of white supremacy culture and the American achievement ideology—namely, the desire for control, perfectionism, and individualism—when comparing the pace of their lives to those of their friends. Until participants could feel secure about where they were in life, these comparisons simmered competition, self-blame, resentment of peers, and isolation. Striving for these ideals also covertly protects the ideologies of dominant groups without having to name any systems of oppression or their beneficiaries. In the end, interview participants often reproduced (as much as they challenged) cultural understandings of a well-lived life, but one way to combat inequality is to transform expectations for compulsory progress.