I envy John Mayer’s guitar playing. He might envy parts of my life.
I’m 24, and one thing I constantly struggle with is feeling like I started guitar too late.
I only really discovered the instrument in 2024, and sometimes that genuinely bothers me. I’ll watch John Mayer play and part of me wishes I could somehow wake up tomorrow with that skill set.
Sometimes I genuinely think, man, I would give almost anything to be able to play like that.
But recently I had a perspective shift.
John Mayer is approaching 50. He has achieved things musically that I can barely comprehend right now. He’s wealthy, famous, respected by everyone, and has spent most of his life becoming unbelievably good at something I’m only beginning to understand.
But when I hear him talk about his life these days, he often talks about wanting marriage and family. He has spoken about wanting children and about finding the right person.
While I’m looking at his life thinking, I wish I had what he has, there may be parts of my life that someone in his position would deeply want too.
I’m 24. I’m married to the love of my life. I have kids. I have a family of my own, and I hopefully still have decades ahead of me to become a much better guitarist.
And that made me realize how strange comparison is.
We rarely compare entire lives.
I compare my guitar playing to John Mayer’s guitar playing.
I don’t compare being 24 to being nearly 50. A 26-year difference.
I don’t compare having decades ahead of me to having decades behind me.
I don’t compare relationships, family, health, opportunities, regrets, timing, or any of the other thousands of things that make up a human life.
We isolate the one thing another person has that we desperately want and temporarily convince ourselves that they have “everything.”
They probably don’t.
Almost everyone is standing on something that somebody else would consider a miracle. That doesn’t mean I’m going to stop wanting to become an incredible guitarist. Quite the opposite. I’m going to practice as hard as I can.
But maybe I don’t need to mourn starting late so much.
I can spend the next 10, 20, 30 years becoming the guitarist I want to become while also appreciating the life I’m already living.
I think that’s one of the beautiful things about life:
You almost always have something that somebody else would give anything to have.
Sometimes you’re so busy looking at what’s missing that you forget you’re already living inside someone else’s dream.
EDIT: Some of the comments made me realize I framed this badly.
The point I was trying to make wasn’t “John Mayer probably envies my life because I’m married with kids.” Reading it back, that does sound self-serving and turns comparison into another kind of scoreboard.
The better realization for me is much simpler: I was comparing one underdeveloped area of my life — guitar — to one of the most developed areas of somebody else’s life.
I started later than I wish I had. John has decades of experience I simply don’t have. That’s fine.
Life also isn’t linear, and two people at completely different ages and stages can’t really be meaningfully compared as whole lives anyway.
So I think the healthier takeaway is just: admire people, learn from them, and let their skill inspire you but compare your progress mostly to who you were yesterday.
Still glad I posted this because some of the pushback actually helped me stress-test the thought.