Is it Time to Rethink Time? From first time sex, to uni, to marriage, kids, careers and buying houses.
Should we be rethinking when we do everything?
Irrespective of what culture you reside in or what religion or lifestyle you happen to observe, there is no escaping the importance – and tyranny – of time. Whether you are waiting for something important to happen, are wildly late for a critical meeting to something more existential, like getting older or worrying about the passing of time’s effect on your health or your face – time is important.
In fact, time used to be one of the things that really separates the young from the old. When you’re young, you can’t wait for things to happen or come – parties, going to uni, your birthday, Christmas-time - but as you get older and things feel like they’re speeding up, you just want it all to slow the hell down.
But in the last few years, the youthful imperviousness to Time has waned. TikTok is absolutely awash with Gen Z anxiety about the tyrannous passing of time and this particularly plays out in people who have barely left their teens discussing whether they need to get preventative Botox, fretting about not having hit any crucial milestones and perhaps most importantly of all, running out of time to get enough experience and plaudits to get their dream job, buy their dream house and live the kind of life only the Jenners and Logans seem to score these days. In the competitive realm of social media one-upmanship long gone are the days when living freely and with youthful abandonment is considered aspirational.
Don’t believe me? Take a read from this ad for a roommate that went viral in 2011. This chill dude sounds like he’s from another planet now, not a twenty-five-year-old from less than fifteen years ago:
"Konichiwa Bitches" - Actual craigslist posting for a roommate
Ironically, despite our best efforts to set our planet on fire and pollute the air we breathe, we are living longer than ever and yet the empirical evidence that most of us will now live significantly beyond ‘three scores and ten’ is doing little to assuage our race with time – and the starting line is getting earlier and earlier.
Chloe (19): I feel like shit every single time I go on TikTok – every other person my age seems to have started their own 8-figure seed-funded company or designed some world-beating app or whatever. I’ve managed to fail my A-levels, not get into uni and murder my goldfish by forgetting to feed it. I just feel like life is passing me by in a blur and I’m failing at every turn.
Sanjay (20): I only went to uni to shut my parents up because they never stop reminding me about my cousins only a couple of years older than me who became partners in law firms, are making six figures, and are getting married to a Miss World pageant who also discovered the cure for cancer. I’m slightly exaggerating the last part but not by much. I’m only twenty in theory but feel like a complete failure already.
Chloe and Sanjay’s accounts are tips of the iceberg with virtually every Gen Z and now Gen A I speak to expressing panic that they’ve left sex too late, careers too late, saving money too late and a myriad of big choices too late – and this is despite having decades in front of them to nail these things.
So, what’s causing this anxious race with time? It seems to be three major factors. The first is of course social media; the LinkedIn humblebrags and TikTok ‘guess what, guys?’ style boasts are enough to cause anxiety for the hardiest of egos and because Gen Z spend so much time on these platforms, the illusion of everyone else’s success is inevitably going to get to them. The second is, unlike the artifice of social media, the growing competitiveness in every sphere and field is quite real. For every job and uni place there really is ferocious competition and ludicrously high bars to entry and long gone are the days when you can wander into a cool, high-paid job with 2 C’s and a U a la Jeremy Clarkson. The third is of course, older parents, carers and relatives who still often see the world through their generational lens when it was the norm (and also much easier) to have gotten married, had a kid(s) and bought a house all in your twenties – and project this expectation onto their kids, causing much, much anxiety!
So, what if, it’s time to not just rethink milestones, but time itself? Despite the fact we (for the most part) have more time and more to do than ever before, there remains a meter on our lives that dictates sex at sixteen, uni at eighteen and babies, high-flying jobs in our twenties and maybe a second home in our late thirties aren’t just expectations ticking away in the background, but what every successful person should be doing and achieving. It’s not surprising that TikTok is constantly in meltdown.
The changing nature of childhood and teen years means unlike just a generation ago when it was practically your duty to pack in as many dodgy experiences and as much rebellion as possible, being young is now a far more (for the most part) insulated and protected state. It’s not unusual for sixteen-year-olds in averagely close-knit households to have barely spent more than a weekend away from home, let alone had to make any major life decisions or done anything that didn’t have a parental-shaped safety net. This isn’t a criticism of young people; it’s just how we tend to raise our young now.
So, it is unsurprising that so many of them are getting major decisions pertaining to sex, identity, expensive university courses and future careers so very wrong, age 16-18, when by the very nature and design of childhood and adolescence, they’ve had to make so few decisions or moves of real consequence before then. I think rather than packing kids off en masse to university at eighteen, where loads of them are either falling apart, not coping, choosing the wrong courses, dropping out or ultimately deferring, it might be time to put the brakes on the sudden and very jarring life-jump at age eighteen and give young people in the older teen years more time – there’s that word again – to figure out who they are, get better social skills, life skills, hell, cooking skills, before they make choices and changes so many are ill-equipped for.
RiRi, 20: I absolutely hated university and stuck it out to my regret for eighteen months before admitting to myself it was a major mistake. And I was one of many in my halls utterly miserable and crying on the regular. It’s not like the old days where our parents claimed they were the best years of our lives. It’s completely different. I’m back home, working now and much happier. I’m going to go back in a year or so, but with a much clearer idea of what I want to do and where I want to go. I didn’t have a clue when I was forced into a panicked decision aged seventeen when I chose my 50K uni course.
And it’s not just teenagers who need a major time re-think. Social media and IRL are awash with twenty-somethings in a panic they’re not even in the same postcode, let alone ballpark of marriage, children, and property ownership; a panic fuelled by social media and older ‘well, in my day’ relatives.
And to this I say, both so what and, there’s so much – there’s that word again – time!
Due to economic and social forces way beyond our control, the dream of home ownership is vanishingly less achievable for the vast majority in our twenties, and this is having (depending on your point of view) the either catastrophic or beneficial outcome of that majority being far less able or willing to cohabit with partners, get married and have children in the decade it wasn’t just typical but expected of our parents and grandparents to do so.
Accepting and celebrating that major milestones that used to happen in our twenties will happen in our thirties or even later is not a failure but instead contains the possibilities maybe we’ll make better choices and just be better at those things later in life.
If we accept that time is changing, life is long and it’s perfectly OK to have sex later, get married later, have children later, buy property later and have our careers sorted much later (or indeed never), than maybe we can all stop ruining our teens, twenties and thirties chasing and worrying about things that used to be happen early because they had to, but now can rock up at different times – and when they’re meant to.
And yes, fertility is a major issue and yes there’s no getting away from the fact you are most fertile in your late teens and twenties, but despite what the Daily Mail and Fox News tell us, you don’t turn into a dry husk in your thirties and even forties and those columnists and anchors lecturing twenty-somethings on “not waiting to have kids” should try having a baby in a gig economy and living in their childhood bedroom.
Life is long (if you’re lucky) and time by its very nature is changing. Young people are still playing by ‘old’ time rules, and I would argue it’s not serving them very well. If lived well, life is a marathon not a sprint and we should all – young and older – make time work for us.
Rather than beat time, let’s rethink it, and start making the most of it instead.
We’ll all be a lot happier, because we’ll have time to be.
This is such a brilliant substack and I look forward to reading it every time thank you