By Giovanna Paganini
By definition, ‘time’ is ‘the indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole.’ So why is it so difficult to stay grounded in the present? Why is it that our minds travel between past and future so seamlessly but can never rest upon and find solace in the present?
Time is paradoxical by nature. It stems from the dichotomy between the literal ‘time on the clock’ and the subjective perception of time. As Virginia Woolf puts it; “The mind of man works with strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented by the timepiece of the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be, and deserves fuller investigation.”
Time encompasses everything: we exist in it, move through it, and are shaped by its passing. Yet, despite its omnipresence, we remain fixated on stopping it, slowing it, capturing it, or somehow controlling its fleeting nature. Nowhere is this paradox more deeply felt than among the young, who live under the distorted perception that they are already running out of time before life has truly begun. This sensation – that life is slipping away even as it unfolds – has become a defining anxiety of our generation, aggravated by a world that never pauses and a culture that demands we always look ahead.
Why do our twenties feel like a deadline rather than a beginning? A time when we should feel most free is instead burdened with the weight of expectation – career, success, social life, relationships, and the vague but urgent pressure to “secure the future.” Has social media exacerbated this longing for time to sit still? Or have we always internalised the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland? Social media has not created this fear, but it has certainly amplified it. This endless cycle of scrolling – we are all victims of, as much as we don’t want to hear it – is plaguing our sacred moments of being. And we are letting it happen. The curated snapshots of our peers seemingly excelling in every aspect of life fuels the illusion that time is a race, and you are already falling behind. But have we always been haunted by the ticking clock? Perhaps social media is merely the mirror reflecting our innate fear of time, an outlet for anxieties that have always existed.
We have become obsessed with preserving moments, hoarding memories – in a box with bits and bobs of your life that you can’t bring yourself to open – in an attempt to freeze time. Nostalgia, once a gentle ache, now dominates our lives – one summer song too painful and nostalgic to play, a childhood home we long for but can never fully return to, a past we romanticise because it is already out of reach, and a feared future that feels already lacking. Of what? You don’t know. Everything. The fear of time slipping away drives us to document everything, to grasp at the ephemeral with photographs and videos, as if capturing a moment could make it last. But in our frantic attempts to hold onto time, are we actually losing it? Are we so preoccupied with archiving our lives that we forget to live them?
Last autumn, the song ‘End of Beginning,’ and especially the phrase “and when I’m back in Chicago I feel it, another version of me I was in it,” was trending on TikTok. It got me reminiscing of the different versions of myself, the versions different people knew me as and perceived me as, and I inevitably fell down the all too familiar rabbit-hole of comparison. I found myself comparing the latest version of myself with childhood, little me, imagining these two selves side by side. In an era where comparison is the oxygen we breathe, how can we escape it? Even when you end the cycle of comparison with other people, the comparison with yourself lies deep. How do you subdue the comparison with the old versions of yourself? How do you stop comparing yourself to what little you had envisioned for you? And the relentless question: if you have lived up to it?
Time moves like water, it rushes like a waterfall indifferent and relentless to what it leaves behind. We watch it ripple away in small, ordinary ways – the memory of your grandfather’s perfume that is slowly fading away as is his seat at the Christmas table. It is now occupied by his little nephew who only knows him through spoken stories. A fleeting sunset we rush to photograph instead of absorbing its iridescence of red. Yet, in doing so, we risk becoming mere spectators in our own existence. We chase time like a balloon that is lost in the hands of a kid and watch it float above us, out of our reach.
As university comes to an end, and the ‘real world’ is waiting for you, you don’t feel up to the standard. But perhaps the standard is just a point of view. At every family gathering the dreaded question is uttered without fail, it hangs in the air like a hook; “So what’s next? What are your post-grad plans?” You freeze. You wish you had the answer. How can you explain you want to travel the world, be a filmmaker, be a writer, be an artist all at once, which means you are inevitably stuck to your seventy-year-old uncle? The future looms, heavy and uncertain, while the past tugs at you, unforgiving. We feel suspended, stuck like a rock fixed in place while boats bob forward as the waves thrust them.
To live in time without fear of losing it – that may be the real challenge of our generation. Perhaps the key is to step away from the White Rabbit’s frantic race, to let nostalgia exist without letting it consume. To accept, as much as we loathe the inescapable truth, that we can’t control time is the first step of many to enjoy the present and welcome what the future has in store for us. If we embrace Woolf’s notion of the ‘time in the mind’, we could be freed from the constraints of time and the pressures it postulates to do everything at once or else.
But perhaps the answer is not in trying to stop time or in chasing after it, but in surrendering to its rhythm.
Image: Jon Tyson via Unsplash