I recently came across a TikTok that has since lodged itself in my brain. A young woman, maybe 22, touched on the long-standing belief that people fear posting online because they don’t want others to talk badly about them. We see this constantly — even in trending videos where people admit to blocking everyone they know so their high school bully’s older sister doesn’t stumble across them on the FYP.
Her reframe was startling in its simplicity: if people are talking about you, they’re spending the most valuable asset in the world — time — on you. Whether in praise or critique, they are allocating a piece of their finite existence to your name. It echoes the old trope that “all press is good press.” Outdated as that phrase may be in today’s culture of cancellation, the sentiment lingers: what could be more flattering than someone giving you a slice of the one thing they can never earn back?
But time, of course, is never so simple. It’s the one currency explained to us in contradictory terms throughout our lives. As a woman in your twenties, older relatives insist you have “so much time.” A 40-year-old coworker chuckles at your impatience, assuring you you’re “still so young.” Yet my gynecologist, with her head betwixt my thighs, suggested freezing my eggs at 28. Instagram celebrates 25-year-olds for already buying homes, getting married, having babies. Everyday, the world tells you simultaneously that you’re too early, and somehow already behind.
I know the feeling well. I used to worry obsessively about my life’s timeline. So much so that I married a man I knew was the wrong man, simply because I was in a rush. I built a life in Texas — bought a house, started a business, threw the 200-person wedding. From the outside, I was “on time,” perfectly settled. And then, not six months after that wedding, I tore it all up. A divorce, a cross-country move, four properties sold, and a big dream followed — I’m here. And I somehow feel more on time than I did when I was forcing my life into a timeline I’d laid out for myself when I was 16.
We live inside these paradoxes every day. We complain there aren’t enough hours to get everything done, then roll our eyes at anyone who dares pursue joy for joy’s sake — pottery, running, gardening — as if they must have “too much time on their hands.” We ache at the thought of how little time remains with our parents. We treat calendars like battlegrounds, measuring productivity in how ruthlessly we can fill them. Yet we fantasize about unstructured hours, the kind of “free time” that feels extinct.
Somehow, busyness has become a flex. We hear people boast about being “booked out,” and we nod approvingly, as if exhaustion equals success. But in reality, the real flex is the opposite. Not I’m so busy, but my time is my own. Power, real power, is not a packed schedule of obligations.
Bethenny Frankel articulated this tension in a TikTok about life with her daughter. She spoke about the difficulty of going anywhere without fans approaching. Grateful as she is — and she reminds her daughter that their life is made possible by this dynamic — she admits it erodes their time together. A quick hello she can handle, but when a coffee run morphs into a mini Shark Tank pitch session, her daughter feels as if she’s been dragged into a business meeting instead of spending a morning with her mom. For Bethenny, it’s a sobering reminder: fame may have given her financial freedom, but it also robbed her of the simplest luxury — the time to just be with her child.
And maybe that’s the through-line: time is always slipping through our fingers, even when we think we’re holding it tight. We’re told we have plenty of it, until we don’t. We feel we’ve wasted it, until hindsight reveals those “wasted” hours as the most luminous. We try to hoard it, plan it, maximize it — but time is the rarest possession precisely because it cannot be owned.
Maybe that 22-year-old TikToker was right. The next time someone spends theirs talking about you, good or bad, remember: they’ve just given you something they’ll never get back. And when someone assures you that you “have time,” consider that both things can be true at once. The only certainty is that it’s passing. The real work is deciding how to spend it before it’s already spent.
