Early in the pandemic, I developed a strange habit. Every night, I’d slip my phone under my pillow and listen to an episode (or six) of “Seinfeld” through a few inches of poly-fill stuffing. Though for anyone who knows me, that inclination probably tracks.

I started watching “Seinfeld” when it debuted on NBC in 1989 and never stopped, watching and rewatching every episode relentlessly on various platforms, reading the scripts in my free time and annoyingly inserting quotes into conversation at every chance. (Apologies to all.)

When the show concluded 25 years ago on Sunday, just days before I graduated from high school, I and my fellow young “Seinfeld” aficionados gathered in front of the TV to say goodbye to Jerry, Elaine, George, Kramer and the many indelible side characters, like Yev Kassem (“The Soup Nazi”) and Marla Penny (“The Virgin”), who denounced them in a courtroom in the show’s polarizing finale. It was technically the end of an era, but for me, it was only the beginning of what would go on to inform every phase of my life.

As it turns out, my strange pillow habit did more than amuse and calm me while I lay sleepless during a profoundly stressful time. In those hours, I started to think about the show differently. Why, as the fabric of society seemed to be fraying, did it seem so prescient? Why did it seem like the four friends — who gleefully, proudly, deftly flouted societal conventions and the rules of traditional adulthood — had long ago tapped into some fundamental truths that, because of the pandemic’s disruptions, many were re-examining?

For the somehow uninitiated, “Seinfeld,” created by Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, stars Seinfeld as a fictionalized version of himself and follows his shenanigans with his three closest friends: his childhood buddy, George Costanza (Jason Alexander); his former girlfriend turned pal, Elaine Benes (Julia Louis-Dreyfus); and his oddball neighbor, Kramer (Michael Richards). It is regarded as one of the greatest shows of all time.

But they also presented an irreverent version of adulthood that I had never seen on TV or in life: a playful yet sophisticated world where grown-ups joked and laughed together and didn’t take themselves too seriously, even when everyone around them was being very serious indeed.

Most important, they openly mocked the notion that professional success, marriage and parenthood were the cornerstones of existence. For me, a serious child surrounded by serious adults — a child who was ostracized by those unable to categorize me, and who knew early that established paths to fulfillment would not apply — this revealed loads of possibilities.

“Seinfeld” outright questioned these constructs. In one episode, when Jerry and George are compelled to wonder whether they need to grow up, Jerry gets an explosive rebuke from Kramer: “What are you thinking about, Jerry? Marriage? Family? They’re prisons! Man-made prisons! You’re doing time.” In another, when George bemoans an awkward office interaction, Jerry, self-satisfied, responds: “I’ve never had a job.” (In a 1993 interview with Charlie Rose, Seinfeld said one benefit of being a comic was the ability to reject many facets of ordinary life: “You just don’t feel part of it, and that’s a good thing.”)

This refusenik sensibility is threaded through the entire series, and any attempt by the characters to sublimate themselves to social norms fizzled quickly and often in grand fashion. Particularly professionally, where opportunities and aspirations came and went: Kramer’s outlandish business ventures; Elaine’s fitful career in publishing; George’s corporate self-sabotage; even Jerry’s hope, in the show’s most meta subplot, to parlay his stand-up career into a successful sitcom.

Some of the funniest scenarios specifically skewered the absurdities of office jobs. In one episode, Kramer is mistaken for an employee after using a company’s bathroom and then keeps returning as if he works there. Wearing a suit and swinging a briefcase that contained nothing but crackers, he was a kid playing office; an impostor without impostor syndrome. Elaine’s professional prospects were subject to the whims of unreasonable, eccentric bosses, but her identity was never defined by her career. Instead her jobs and superiors acted as foils for her personality to flourish.

But crucially, after each of their many failures, the characters largely ended up just as they were before: fine, unbothered, unscathed and rarely dejected for long. This certainly had a precedent rooted in reality: When Terry Gross asked David in 1992 if the show’s early low ratings were demoralizing, he responded, “If the show got canceled, it didn’t make a difference to either one of us.”

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Maya Salam is a senior staff editor on the Culture desk at The New York Times. Previously, she was a Times gender reporter, writing the In Her Words newsletter, with the Gender Initiative. And before that, she was a breaking news and general assignment reporter on the Express desk. Maya started at The Times in 2015 as a copy editor on the Business desk.