It’s about time

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. Stylist’s biggest study to date has found that time pressure is the definitive angst of our generation. As we launch Think Stylist, 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. A single theme kept cropping up again and again. Time. Very few of us feel we have enough of it. A massive 87% of the women we asked are feeling the pressure of time to achieve everything they want in life. Grace, 30, from Somerset, says that the last few years of her life have felt like “a race”. “I’ve been trying to save money and prove myself at work so I can get promoted, but I’ve wanted to travel and create memories with my friends like you’re meant to when you’re young, but then I’m also trying to meet someone I can see myself spending my life with. I just wish I could hit pause sometimes.” This feeling that time is moving too fast is a uniquely human experience, according to Alan Burdick, author of Why Time Flies. “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 unu