A lifetime contains long stretches that a biography can cross in one sentence.

A biography crosses a decade in a sentence, and that sentence contains thousands of ordinary days that felt like nothing much while they were happening. Reading lives in summary teaches you to expect narrative, so your own long unremarkable stretches start to feel like failures of plot rather than what most of any life consists of.

When a period feels shapeless, remember that shapelessness is normal and mostly invisible in the retellings you compare yourself against. The years that would be summarised in half a line are still the years you get to live in. Judge them by whether the days are decent rather than by whether they would make good reading later.