Between biological clock for women and financial clock for men

For decades, society has repeated one sentence to women with the confidence of a natural law, your biological clock is ticking.

It is said casually, sometimes cruelly, often with authority. It shapes choices, fuels panic, and polices timelines. It teaches women that time is an enemy, fertility a deadline, and worth something that expires.

What we rarely say, what we almost never say out loud, is that men also live under a clock. They do. We just renamed it.

While women are warned about biology, men are disciplined by economics. While one clock is spoken about openly, endlessly, the other operates quietly, relentlessly. Men are not told it exists. They are simply judged by it. If women have a biological clock, men have a financial clock. And like all clocks, it ticks loudly, judges silently, and punishes brutally when ignored. The difference is not whose pressure is real. The difference is who society allows to be anxious, and who it expects to perform.

From an early age, boys are trained into a countdown. Not a countdown to love or emotional readiness, but to visible competence. In school, they are praised less for softness and more for promise. By their twenties, the questions sharpen. What do you do? Are you working? Are you building something? Not who are you, but are you moving?

By thirty, the clock gets louder. A man who is still figuring things out is no longer seen as hopeful. He is seen as suspicious. His potential begins to expire in the eyes of employers, families, and romantic partners. By forty, explanations stop mattering. Society no longer asks what happened. It assumes the worst.

A man without money is told he has time. A man without direction is told he is failing. That is the clock.

And unlike women’s biological anxiety, this pressure comes without sympathy. No language exists to hold men’s financial fear. No social permission is granted to name it. Instead, men are told to “man up,” to grind harder, to hustle longer, to swallow failure quietly.

So while women are pressured to race against biology, men are pressured to outrun economics. And economics is ruthless in a different way.

Biology has limits, yes. But money has volatility. Markets crash. Jobs disappear. Industries die. Illness interrupts. Wars happen. A man can do everything “right” and still lose years to forces completely outside his control. Yet the clock does not pause. Society does not recalibrate its expectations. It simply keeps counting.

This is why men age differently. Not because they don’t feel time but because they feel performance.

A man’s worth is allowed to grow with age only if his finances grow with it. When they don’t, age becomes a liability rather than an asset. Youth forgives poverty. Middle age does not.

This is also why many men delay commitment, not because they fear responsibility, but because they fear exposure. To love openly without financial stability is to risk being seen as inadequate. To marry without “arriving” is to invite judgment. Men are not avoiding timelines,they are negotiating survival under one.

The tragedy is not that women’s clocks are discussed. It is that men’s clocks are denied.  Men feel time in quiet, humiliating ways. When peers pass them by.

When younger colleagues earn more. When respect slips before it ever arrives. When ambition outpaces opportunity. They feel it when they are asked to lead without being allowed to struggle.

They feel it when worth is measured only in outcomes, never in effort. The silence around this clock is dangerous. It breeds shame. It teaches men to equate self-worth with net worth. It makes failure feel personal even when it is structural. And it explains why so many men break quietly under pressure no one names.

Acknowledging that men have a clock too is not a competition with women’s realities. It is not a denial of sexism or biology. It is an expansion of honesty.

Both clocks exist. Both are cruel in different ways. Both shape choices, love, fear, and timing. But here is the uncomfortable truth: the financial clock is less merciful because it pretends not to exist.

At least women are warned. Men are simply judged. If we want healthier relationships, more honest partnerships, and societies that do not quietly exhaust their men, we must stop pretending time only disciplines women. It disciplines men differently but no less harshly. Men do not escape time. They just pay for it in silence.

And silence, history keeps reminding us, is the most expensive cost of all. Time judges quietly. But it always keeps score.

•Written By Stephanie Shaakaa