Our Generation’s Obsession With Time — And Wasting It

Chronophobia is the fear of time. It’s said to be characterized by an irrational yet persistent fear of time and the passing of it — and it’s often named a ‘rare’ phobia. Yet, when I look around at our culture and the way that we live, Chronophobia doesn’t seem so rare. In fact, it seems to plague almost everybody.

“Time was passing like a hand waving from a train that I wanted to be on.” ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

It’s ironic that we waste so much time worried about wasting it. It’s why we scroll for hours through Netflix recommendations, deliberate on what we should wear to an upcoming event, and most of all panic over what we will do with our life. We want our time to be spent perfectly. And in striving for perfection, we create an unhealthy obsession for it. We start feeling as though every moment needs to be one of bliss. And when not every moment is, we begin to resent ourselves and our life.

This is also evident in our obsession with youth and our direct relation of youth with beauty. We think our best years are the ones where we are young and so youth becomes a currency. We are told to age gracefully and keep up with trends so as not to appear “old.”

However, research has shown that people report the highest levels of happiness and life satisfaction after the age of 55 in three key areas: their financial situation, their physical appearance, and their well-being. I often hear people who are 50+ say things like “You’re 30, you have so much time left.” Whereas I hear 25-year-olds calling 30-year-olds “old.”

I think our warped perception of time is defined by two things:

1 — Fear of Failure

2 — Comparison

Since I was about fourteen, I have had a (mostly) irrational fear of time. The fear of time passing by, the worry of wasting it, anxiety about getting older both in numbers, and in visibly aging. But most of all, the fear of time passing by and me not getting any better. I realised recently that my fear is not of time itself but of myself moving through it without achieving my goals and experiencing life to the fullest. What we all really have — is a fear of failure. It’s a fear of reaching 70 years old and realising that you have regrets. Big ones. A fear of looking back and seeing chunks of your life spent doing something you hated or being with someone you didn’t love. It’s a fear of feeling as though you started with all of these goals, and didn’t achieve any of them. It’s a feeling of failing yourself, and other people.

We are not only internally wanting to feel we are succeeding, but we have an innate desire to showcase to the world how successful we are. We are so afraid of other people knowing that we failed at something. It’s why we post all of our small wins on social media and never our defeats. And this makes us believe that no one else is failing either.

Furthermore, our obsession with comparing ourselves only adds injury. We are in our teens, 20s and early 30s, living in the age of ‘comparison’. If we want to feel bad about ourselves, social media is there to provide that service. I often compare myself with 17-year-olds who have a viral online business and are making thousands every month. We have a plethora of more successful, more ‘beautiful’ people to compare ourselves to and we often spend time doing that as a way to distract our brains from a fear of failure.

If we can convince ourselves that we will never be good enough, it means that we never have to try. We don’t have to fail at something because we didn’t even start it. It’s easy to compare yourself to someone else doing what you’d love to do and feel as though the space you were meant to be in has already been filled.

“We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths; In feelings, not in figures on a dial.”

In the end we will not measure our life by how much our bodies and faces fit the beauty standard. We will not look upon our life and wonder how it looked to other people. We will not quantify the value of our life by how much we assimilated to other people’s standards.

We will view it for how it was — a beautiful expression of us. A series of defeats, mistakes, misjudgements — but also moments of joy, bliss, wonder and love. Life is an accumulation of all of those things. It’s not perfect and it doesn’t follow a direct path, schedule or time management journal. It just is.