Abstract:

In an increasingly accelerating modern society, time anxiety among graduate students has become increasingly prevalent. The“melancholy at the tip of the ivory tower”is no longer merely a personal distress arising from surrounding circumstances,but rather a public issue rooted in social structure that reflects the living conditions of the postgraduate population. Although individual differences among graduate students lead to diverse forms of time experience,there is notable similarity and consistency in their core experiences and in the logic underlying the cyclical reproduction of time anxiety. Time anxiety is the core time experience of contemporary graduate students. The contradiction of time capacity,the excessive moralization of time,and self-exploitation of the subject are three specific manifestations of this anxiety. Time anxiety is embedded in the cycle of social acceleration,giving rise to a self-imposed pressure that reproduces itself through a recursive mechanism.

Key words: accelerating society, graduate student, time experience