Once upon a time someone put pen to paper and wrote a children’s story about a girl called Cinderella (a man, incidentally, called Charles Perrault), whose future happiness and freedom depended on whether she fell in love before the clock struck midnight. A few centuries later some genius (a man,the lack of it, passing of it, the threat to never waste a second of it – has become a stick to beat ourselves with. When you stop and think about the subtle (and not so subtle) ways that time is weaponized, it’s no surprise that the results of the biggest ever survey of our readers – conducted by , a new insight agency born from our day-one mission to know and understand our audience better than any other media brand – found that a huge 87% of us feel the pressure of time to achieve everything we want in life. And what we want is still, for so many of us, those traditional milestones. So, in this issue of we tackle Generation Tick Tock. We explore why a traditional timeline still feels like success (pg 70), and how we can start to challenge that and go at our own pace. We meet four inspiring women in their 70s and 80s (pg 74) who are proof that there’s absolutely no time limit to our dreams. Our columnist Billie Bhatia (pg 29) talks about single person maths in a brilliantly relatable and funny essay. And we look at the modern pressure to be constantly productive (pg 76). I’ll leave you with the words of Anne, who wrote her first novel age 70. “It’s not a book I could have written in my younger years. It needed that sense of maturity and confidence to make the story what it is”. Maybe Cinders got it wrong and it’s time we rethink our attitude. There doesn’t have to be an expiry date on our dreams.
