Individual action requires continuously re-aligning everyday, lifetime, and epochal time horizons

Evidence

Only the interplay of all three of these levels of time and their respective time horizons determines the being-in-time of an actor, and they must be brought into accord with each other in a continuously renewed fashion. For example, when the daily routine of a student consists in waking up at noon, then going to the café, and finally to the revolutionary student club, sooner or later the pressing question will arise whether this is compatible with his plan to become a bona fide university professor and spend his retirement comfortably in Tuscany and whether this kind of routine can be seriously maintained if he doesn’t want to be economically excluded in the middle to long run. Similarly, the question will arise whether his life plan is in general still in step with the times—and whether it is still in step with the times to make long-term life plans. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration, 93

Categorization

• XREF: The late-modern erosion of the very possibility of long-term life plans foreshadows the chapter’s acceleration-crisis thesis about desynchronization between life plans and social tempo. — connects to: Temporal structures mediate between individual life-plans and systemic requirements. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 46
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: Rosa suggests that in acceleration it may no longer be ‘in step with the times’ to make long-term life plans — this is the seed of the desynchronization argument.