Notes for a Sociological Analytic of Temporal Discomfort

Abstract

The article proposes the rudiments of a framework for the analysis of social conditions in which time is most likely to be experienced as a problem. To do this, we start from a circumscription of the idea of temporal discomfort, a type of experience of time lived by the actors themselves as a problem or suffering. Based on this clarification ten forms of temporal discomfort are then differentiated, which include different meanings of “lack of time” but also phenomena such as temporal emptiness or problematic relationships with the past and the future. It is then postulated that all these discomforts can be interpreted as a product of contradictions between wanting, duty and power, factors that are socially constituted and are, therefore, different in different structural positions.