The standard moves and it never announces that it moved

Here is the part that does the damage.

Each thing you see nudges up your sense of where a person like you ought to be by now. None of them nudge it down. Nothing arrives on the feed to tell you that most people your age have not memorised that much, do not have that kitchen, and are also awake at midnight feeling like this.

So the line for where you should be rises slowly all day, and the line for where you actually are does not move. The gap between the two lines is the feeling. And because nobody announced that the standard had moved, it does not feel like the standard rose. It feels like you fell.