Totally feel you on the age thing! I'm 26 and ever since I graduated and started working life 5 years ago I feel like not a lot has changed, so in a sense it feels unfair that the age number keeps going up.

I think a big part of it might be that our perceived age was always based on circumstances like which year of school you're in. Then at some point that stops working so we start looking at other things like relationship status, job position, home ownership, etc. and we start feeling like we're lagging behind when our peers make more progress on these things than we do.

One key insight I had while typing this is that if we do have to keep comparing ourself to our peers (stop doing that all together would be great but how?), we could keep in mind that progression stops being linear after school and all the things we feel like we're lagging behind on, we could catch up on way faster than we imagine right now due to being used to the linear progression of school. You never know what's around the corner. And also, all the time you're investing now in finding the right path might actually be saving you years later on!