What do you fear? Off the bat and superficially, I could give you a sample of answers: alligators/crocodiles, sharks, zombies, heights, 6am, the L train at any hour of the day, and seeing the blinking light on my Wi-Fi router switch from green to red. And there are hundreds of others

But the idea that fills me most with dread is the passing of time. Or, to be more specific, its quickening pace. A smarter person than I once explained that time passes faster relative to our ages, because we’ve experienced more or less of life. To children, a year seems never ending, as they’ve only known so few and cannot accurately gauge twelve months strung together through 365 days. But as adults, we know that an hour amounts to nothing, and that we may as well keep some of the more neutral holiday décor hanging around the house, because before we know it, it’ll just be time to put it up again.

And this is unnerving because the older I get, the more knowledge I have, and the more knowledge I have, the more I want to do with it while being painfully aware of my diminishing time to do so.

I wish there was a way to reset the clock. Of course, there isn’t.

Occasionally, this overwhelming reality mandates two drastic modes of thinking: Try, very frantically, to do everything, or give up completely and do nothing. Neither is a viable option.

It is impossible in this known universe to have it all, an idea our culture has become so unhealthily obsessed with that it drives people to the brink of exhaustion-ridden insanity. But to relinquish the idea of possibility—to abandon dreams and aspirations—isn’t a suitable alternative either.

Instead, it might serve better to consider time as the entity that forces your hand, rather than the one suppressing it.

What do YOU really care about? Where do YOUR passions lie? Time commands you to choose, and for the better. By carving out the unnecessary fat that comes with “having it all,” you become a leaner, faster, more efficient goal-achieving machine. Your legitimate interests deserve that concentrated attention. More importantly, time calls on you to reflect on what you find paramount in life: not what “should” be crucial, but what you actually feel to be so. You can discover a great deal about yourself through that deceptively simple task that in turn, can completely skew your outlook on everything.

So if you’ll excuse me, I have to go see about some Internet memes.

Forever 21 sweater; Zara pants; Loeffler Randall sandals; Handmade necklace.