My friend Mark e-mailed around this op-ed by writer Tim Kreider earlier this week. “Brilliant read,” he said.

Brilliant read was right.

I strongly encourage you to peruse it yourself, but for purposes of maybe-you-have-a-lot-of-work-to-do-at-work-today, it’s about a man’s thoughts on how we personally choose to move through life, and how we view the choices of others relative to ours’ around the time we hit 40.

His version is clearer.

“The Referendum is a phenomenon typical of (but not limited to) midlife, whereby people, increasingly aware of the finiteness of their time in the world, the limitations placed on them by their choices so far, and the narrowing options remaining to them, start judging their peers’ differing choices with reactions ranging from envy to contempt.”

So we get older, time becomes more finite-feeling, and as such we judge the way our peers choose to spend that time more…judgey-ly.

I’ve never been to midlife, so I can’t say whether or not this phenomenon is fact, but based on Kreider’s description and my general knowledge of humans, it sure seems so.

But as I read through the piece UmmHhmmand-ing Amen-ing outloud with every new paragraph, I realized that that there’s another stage in life where this pattern of behavior rears its not-wildly-attractive head.

You see where I’m going.

Never have I been more aware of exactly where my peers are in life, what decisions they’re making, and how different they are than my own. I’ve written about this before, back when we were all obsessed with the whole quarter-life crisis situation.

We are undoubtedly at the time in our lives where every decision feels all-the-more major because we don’t know how significant or insignificant it will be. Everything is a game-changer because we’ve only just started playing the game.

The life phase Kreider writes about is the one where you’ve decided to play the game, are fairly set in your game-playing ways, and now know what kinds of benefits and costs that play of game will yield. He’s referring to the second hour of RISK.

I’m referring to the first thirty minutes, and I’m going to boldly declare that I think the amount of judging going on then (now), while different in nature, is actually greater in quantity.

Every single day I see another status update from a random Facebook friend and think, “shit, she’s doing that?! I’m not doing that?… But maybe I should be…” And then, hard as I try to stop it, I judge.

“Well, she’s probably just doing that because __________” or “It’s so typical of her to do that because ________________” or “She’s doing that now but that just means she’ll be burned out and looking for something else to do soon.”

We judge, not because we think we know best, but because we’re just so desperately trying to know something. At 40-something Kreider can look at a stable, family-man friend and say, “sure he has money, but he never traveled the world, and I think that’s more valuable.” We 20-somethings are stuck with looking at the peers around us making decisions based on finance versus love or family versus adventure or passion versus stability and having to guess who will end up happier, why, and how we feel about that. We have our own sense of value, desire, and goal, but no real idea how it will all turn out. Some of my friends got married very young. When that happened I said (to myself), what a mistake, they have their whole lives to get married. That’s my personal world view, but it’s not rooted it anything other than that, and there’s a very strong possibility it’s wrong.

And – and here’s the fascinating thing about it all – when I think about the root feeling behind my comment I realize I said it to make myself feel more “right” in my world of unknown. To validate myself. To make me comfortable with my chosen path. To make me right, and everyone else less right.

“I just want someone to tell me that I’m doing OK,” I once told a friend who was counseling me after my decision to leave one job for another.

“I think somebody would if anybody knew,” she said.

And if there’s one thing that always comes with a lack of knowledge it’s a whole lot of judgment and assumption – different assumptions and judgments than apparently await us 20-some years from now, but undoubtedly from that same place of insecurity.

So thank you Tim Kreider. You write a fine piece of opinion. And with it you render me less annoyed at the 20-something set and more annoyed at the entire human condition. No judgment, of course.