When you are still figuring things out, the people who seem to have arrived can be hard to be around. They have the clear answer, the settled path, the tidy story about where they are going. Next to them, your own searching can feel like falling behind, like everyone else got the instructions and you missed them. The feeling is common, it is convincing, and it is built on a comparison that does not actually hold up.
Comparison is automatic, and that is the problem
Humans evaluate themselves by looking at others. The drive is built in, and it kicks in hardest when there is no objective measure, which is exactly the situation when you are uncertain about your own direction (Festinger, 1954). So the comparing is not a character flaw or a sign of insecurity. It is a default setting. But a default setting can still feed you bad conclusions, and this one usually does.
You are comparing your inside to their outside
The comparison is structurally unfair. You know your own uncertainty in full, every doubt and unresolved question, while you only see the other person's polished exterior. You cannot see what their certainty cost, whether it came from genuine exploration or from settling early to escape discomfort, or whether the path that looks so settled actually fits them as well as it appears to. You are measuring your interior process against their exterior result, and those are not comparable quantities.
Comparison tends to produce shame, not information
Here is the practical cost. Research comparing how happier and less happy people respond to others finds that dwelling on social comparison reliably erodes well-being, and that the people who suffer most are the ones who treat others' apparent success as a verdict on themselves (Lyubomirsky & Ross, 1997). Comparison rarely tells you anything useful about your own next step. It mostly converts into shame, and shame is a poor environment for the honest self-examination that searching requires.
Different seasons are not a race
The deeper error is treating life as a single track everyone runs at the same pace. Exploration is not behind arrival. It is a different mode with a different job. Someone settled is doing one kind of work, and you are doing another, and comparing the two produces a false hierarchy where there is really just difference. The settled person may well face later the questions you are answering now, and answering them now is not slower. It is simply when you are doing it.
What to do with the feeling
You will not stop comparing entirely, but you can change what you do with it. When the behind feeling arrives, name it: this is comparison, and comparison is unreliable here. Redirect attention to whether your own searching is producing anything, which is the only measure that actually applies to you. And be selective about your inputs, including the curated certainty that scrolls past on a screen, which is the exterior result with all the cost edited out.
You are not behind. You are in a different part of the work than the people you keep measuring yourself against, and the part you are in is not optional. It is where a real direction comes from.
References
Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations, 7(2), 117–140.
Lyubomirsky, S., & Ross, L. (1997). Hedonic consequences of social comparison: A contrast of happy and unhappy people. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73(6), 1141–1157.