I’ve long fallen into the compare and despair trap, starting when I was nine years old and mentally ranked my prettiness against all the other girls in my school year. Social media worsened it. So too did turning 30, which prompted a resentment towards anyone who accomplished anything in their 20s and caused an “I have achieved nothing with my life” spiral.

As I entered 2026, I thought I had my comparison habit mostly under control. I’d recently got married. We had a mortgage and two cats. I’d published my first book. I had a fancy-sounding job title. I was, by most metrics, nailing it. I had my life together. When I did compare myself to others, I felt comfortably average.

Then I lost my job. And comparison came rushing back in like a high tide. I felt like a failure, a loser… every mean word under the sun. Look at yourself, I thought, 33, jobless, depressed. Suddenly, anyone with the security of employment was someone to compare myself against and come up short. I turned my age into a stick to beat myself with, scolding myself for not having my shit together at the grand old age of 33, while also lamenting that I was “over the hill” and my time in the sun had passed.

I hated being in my 30s: so many cons with seemingly no pros. Hangovers were more brutal. My face seemed to be pulled downwards as though a vacuum were being held under my jaw. I looked, and felt, exhausted. My comparison expanded to find new benchmarks. I looked back on my 20-something self with envy: she was so ambitious and impressive! So young! So hot! She had so much energy! God, if I could only go back in time.

I’ve found an unexpected remedy: watching It Gets Worse.

If, like me, you are a woman over 30, you might have let this Channel 4 comedy pass you by. The marketing has focused on the lead, Leo Reich, who also wrote the show, and as such it has come across as a show about a young gay man in London, which, as a woman in my 30s, I didn’t expect to see myself in. Millennial women like me were far more drawn to Andrew Scott as “Hot Priest” in Fleabag than as a therapist telling It Gets Worse’s lead character, Ethan, that he’s “just a hole for daddy”.

But I urge you to give it a chance, because this is the show that has cured me of my nostalgia habit. It’s about three friends in their 20s in London, and they make being in your 20s look bloody awful. Hilarious, sure. But not even a tiny bit aspirational. Relatable, but in a way that made me newly appreciative of being far, far away from those hazy post-university days.

Ethan is joined by two female best friends, Abi (Emily Fairn) and Sam (Olive Gray). Abi is in a disappointing relationship with an older man and, when we meet her, she’s excitedly anticipating a “promotion” at her internship. Sam is an aspiring writer living in a commune-esque property guardianship, along with her ex-girlfriend and a bunch of creatives who share a MUBI account.

I connected with both of these women, hard. Like Abi, I left university in a glum relationship that was on its last legs. I went on to spend a few years in a situationship with a man who refused to acknowledge my existence to any of his friends and family, frequently pulled disappearing acts, and simply could not commit to a label of any type (were we “dating”? Nope).

In It Gets Worse, Abi persists in her relationship even though her boyfriend is rarely up for sex, leaving her baffled and unwanted, and even after a dramatic dinner party ends things, she keeps rushing back into his arms, red flags and all. While my younger self’s relationship dynamic was not identical to Abi’s (at least her uninterested guy would admit they were in a relationship!), watching the show I saw my desperation to make it work, my hope that one day the guy I was launching myself at would change his ways and finally make me feel worthy of love.

In my 30s, I would never put up with such a bizarre situation. I’m married now, to an excellent man who has been clear about his intentions. But more importantly: 33-year-old me has got enough self-confidence to know that my worth is not determined by a man’s affections. Watching Abi contort herself to fit a relationship that clearly isn’t working made me think of my younger self, again in the usual comparison terms, but this time, for the first time, current me came out on top.

It was a similar sensation watching Sam awkwardly trying to turn a couple into a throuple. Even Ethan, a wealthy, entitled man who I didn’t think I would connect with, provided that “God, I’m so glad I’m not in my 20s” feeling. In the show, he tries to figure out whether a guy he fancies likes him back, teetering on the edge of mania. I was reminded of the energy I spent trying to understand men when I was younger, my fevered belief that the problem must be me, not them, and that if I just worked a little harder, performed better, looked hotter, these baffling creatures would be magically, uncomplicatedly, in love with me.

The flipped and reversed comparison continued outside the show’s depiction of romantic relationships. I saw myself in Abi when she forced excitement at being told her promotion was in fact not really a promotion, and would thus feature no pay rise. I nodded as she went along with being made part of the “people” team. I saw in her my own, younger thirst for career success at any cost, and was able to pat myself on the back for now being able to call out toxic work environments and ask for what I deserve.

The final reflection the show presented back at me: how comparison culture played out in the characters’ lives, too. Abi approaches life like a series of checkboxes, all selected to appear suitably impressive to the outside world. Sam is a writer, and has a clear desperation to be perceived as talented and respectable. Ethan’s ego seems sufficiently robust, but he’s still sucked into scrolling on his phone for hours, and I can only imagine that part of that time on social media is spent comparing himself to everyone else. I watched them navigate this and felt sorry for them. Which in turn made me question what on earth I was doing repeating the same miserable cycle.

Watching the show made me laugh. It’s great entertainment, especially the sex party scenes. But I gained much more from It Gets Worse than I expected. I started to appreciate the previously unspotted benefits of getting older: the self-knowledge, the experience, the solidity of who I am. I stopped looking back at being 20 with such rose-tinted glasses, the show reminding me that youth really wasn’t all I’d imagined it to be. It prompted me to take stock of all the great things I have going for me, out of sheer appreciation of no longer living like these characters. My house felt bigger and better as I watched Ethan trying to fill a room in a rented flat share, and my career, though less stable than it was this time last year, is in a far better place than any of the trio’s.

Ask the women a decade or two ahead of me and I suspect they’d tell me the title has it backwards. And watching comparison culture play out on screen made me finally understand its total futility. I’m too old for that rubbish. And what a wonderful thing that is.