sign of the times
Stylist’s new research shows that 87% of women are feeling the pressure of time to achieve everything they want in life. Why does the ticking clock sound louder than ever?
WORDS: meena alexander
Illustrations: Julie Houts
Tick, tock. I started to hear it during those endless pandemic months. The slow ticking away of my twenties, two years of messing up and messing around that I’d never get back. Tick, tock. It got louder every time I saw someone my age announce their engagement, their promotion, the fact that they’d picked up the keys to their two-bed new build. Tick, tock. A constant reminder that no matter what I was achieving, I was still on a timer to tick off the next thing. Now I’m months from my 30th birthday, and the clock inside my head is practically screaming. Time is passing you by, it shouts like an alarm I can’t snooze. Are you using it wisely? I’m far from the only one battling against the unstoppable march of the second hand. biggest study to date has found that time pressure is the definitive angst of our generation. As we launch , a new insight agency born from our day-one mission to know and understand our audience better than any other media brand, we asked women across the UK to tell us how they feel about every area of their lives from careers to kids, finances to feminism. Aa uniquely human experience, according to Alan Burdick, author of . “It’s one of the oldest complaints in civilisation,” he says. “There’s a poem by a Roman man from 2,000 years ago that’s essentially him moaning about sun dials and wishing he could escape them.” Being painfully aware that our time is finite is an evolutionary gift, explains Burdick, that makes us feel the pressure to give that time meaning. But for our generation of women in particular, this relationship has been put under an unusual amount of stress. When the Covid pandemic forced us into lockdown, it suddenly made things stand still. But when we were able to resume our lives in full again, suddenly it felt like time was racing away from us. Recently, there’s been talk of the ‘pandemic skip’: the dissonance that people in their twenties and thirties are experiencing between the age we feel (ie the one we were before lockdowns) and the age we actually are. All those things that allow us to grow, progress and work towards the life we want were put on pause, and now we feel like we need to play catch up.
