“Gate-shut panic” — the dread that one's window is closing, that chances bound to a stage of life will seal over before one has done what one meant to do..
“Gate-shut panic” — the dread that one's window is closing, that chances bound to a stage of life will seal over before one has done what one meant to do.
More specific than generic anxiety or FOMO. FOMO is about a specific event one might miss now; Torschlusspanik is about life-stage opportunities permanently closing — classically the mid-life “biological clock.”
Tor “gate” + Schluss “closing” + Panik “panic” = “gate-shut panic.”
German: Tor + Schluss + Panik. The picture is medieval: a town's gates were barred at dusk, and anyone still beyond the walls faced a night shut out in the open. (Wiktionary.)
The literal medieval gate-closing image was extended to the modern sense of running out of time in life. English adoption reported (OED) from the early 1960s — unverified directly.