That’s right: instead of staring at other thirty-somethings on Instagram and wondering why their life looks so much better than ours, it’s time to stop “focusing on what others have or appear to have, especially in the age of curated social media portrayals”. Remember: nothing ugly or imperfect will make the grid anyway.

“The focus should be on yourself, the growth you have achieved so far, acceptance and gratitude for where you are at and striving to grow into the person you want to become,” says Dr Ben-Ari.

“It’s about developing inner qualities rather than achieving external praises and statuses. After all, every decade has its own beauty and challenges, and life can surprise us in unexpected ways at different times,” she continues. “I believe that the more you experience life, the more you grow back into yourself. We need to strive for two qualities: one is acceptance and celebrating how far we have come, and the other is striving to grow into the person we want to become with more and more meaning and purpose to shine our own unique light in this world. Shifting focus to the present and living mindfully in the ‘now’ can help in not generalising decades as a whole, promoting a more balanced and fulfilling perspective on life.”

To put it in laywoman’s terms, then, we need to all put less pressure on ourselves and treat our 30s less as a decade and more as a series of days, weeks, months and years. Rather than focusing on it as a whole, and instead of homing in on the big life goals we’ve checked off (or haven’t), we need to celebrate the little wins as and when they come. To find our own reasons to be joyful, rather than trying to live up to the template that society forces upon us. To be less like the cast of Friends and more like the hobbits in JRR Tolkien’s fantasy series, who come of age on their 33rd birthday and aren’t expected to have achieved much at all before that point – other than, say, enjoy a lot of delicious breakfasts.

“It’s supposed to be the best decade of our lives – so why are so many of us struggling to enjoy our 30s?”