Time

Time is the one dimension of experience we cannot elude. But the nature of lived time is changing dramatically. We are living ever longer, but we suffer from endemic shortages of time. For many, in the inversion of the old motto, time has become a more valuable commodity than money. Middle age and old age have been moved back, with a numerical adjustment of at least a decade, and women in their sixties are defying biological clocks with IVF treatment. But we are also working longer hours, and collapsing distinctions between labour and leisure. Technology is compressing time into ever-briefer units, shortening the span of our patience and attention. Other advances mean that we now exist in several time-zones at once; and in the virtual time of no place at all.

In recent years we have seen announcements of the end of nature, history, and the human. In this bold, thought-provoking book, spanning fields from psychoanalysis and neuroscience to biology and technology, Eva Hoffman asks: are we also coming to the end of time as we know it?