Navigating Your 20s: The Fear of Running Out of Time

By En Qi Tan

I’m 22 years old and I have no idea what I’m gonna do with the rest of my life. And I’m fine with that.

— Jillian Stewart, Get a Job (2016)

We are almost a quarter of the way through 2026. Yet I feel like I haven’t done anything at all. Deadlines are approaching, I have three weeks of readings to catch up on, and most importantly, I haven’t even built my LinkedIn profile. I’m a second-year university student without any work experience. A summer internship needs to be secured this year, because what if no one wants to hire me when I graduate? I just turned twenty-two, and somehow I’ve convinced myself that I’m already running out of time.

Stepping into our twenties, it’s almost like we’re expected to do everything at once – study, get a job, travel the world, start saving to buy a house. Have fun, but be serious about life. Learn how to drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes, but take care of your body. Visit museums before your 26-year-old-free-ticket privilege expires. Somewhere between the lecture halls and LinkedIn announcements, we are supposed to draft a detailed master plan for the rest of our life.

If you’re a woman, the pressure multiplies. You’re told to cherish this phase of life because you’re at your “youngest and most attractive”. Go to the gym. improve your makeup skills. develop your personal style. Curate an “unbasic” personality. Be “disgustingly well-read”. Everything feels urgent, as if a woman turns into a can of expired tuna the moment she hits thirty.

Then you notice your parents getting older. You realise how quickly time moves. You’re suddenly hit with the fact that they won’t be here forever. You want to spend more time with them, yet living your own life feels like drifting away. Prioritising personal life feels like the betrayal of leaving them behind. Guilt is a permanent resident in your state of mind.

Taking rest starts to feel uneasy and suspicious. Doing nothing but laundry on a weekend feels like wasting potential. Every action must serve a monetisable purpose. Instead of doom-scrolling, I could have watched an intellectually stimulating film from my carefully curated Letterboxd watchlist. Instead of lying in bed, I could have gone to St George’s Market, the Ulster Museum, or at least the McClay Library. Productivity becomes a moral standard we are all subjected to.

There is so much to learn, to do, to achieve. If only there were more time.

And yet, with everything that is going on in the world right now, it doesn’t feel exactly stable. You scroll through headlines about the climate crisis, genocides, ICE raids, Epstein, Trump. You feel like the cycle of systemic violence is endless. The world is volatile, and the future feels fragile. The “promised life” we were told to prepare for doesn’t feel guaranteed anymore. That is where the helplessness creeps in alongside confusion. The uncertainty of the world intensifies the urgency of our own timelines. We feel like we need to hurry up.

If life is a race, then what does it race towards? Stability? Success? We treat our twenties like a countdown and the age of thirty like a final nail in the coffin. But we always forget that life is about the process of experimentation. No, you don’t have to be a millionaire by the age of thirty. You don’t have to buy a car and own a house. Yes, you are allowed to change your career if you realise it’s not for you. You are allowed to start over.

Your twenties may mean a lot to you, but it doesn’t define you as a whole. If pop culture taught us anything, it is that life rarely begins on a fixed schedule. Take Carrie Bradshaw from Sex and the City as an example. She is in her thirties while she’s trying to figure everything out. She is still confused, chaotic, and emotionally unstable. And yet, she was only in the first season. Across the seasons, her career stabilises, her friendship deepens, and she continues navigating life on her own terms. Her life doesn’t expire at thirty, and never will. It expands. So will yours.

Twenties, so confusing. And I’m fine with that.