Inner Time and Social Time in a World of Uncertainty

Abstract

This article discusses how inner rhythms and social roles can be kept together and how to pass from one to another without breaking the unity and continuity of one's identity. The author first outlines some of the paradoxes that a complex society based on information creates in the experience of time. He then analyses how the opposition of inner rhythms and social rhythms in everyday life leads to new pressures on personal identity and social organization, and considers how to cope with the fragmentation and multiplication of times. The ability to change in the present by preserving the continuity and the boundaries of one's existence is the challenge faced by contemporary individuals, but this new situation makes time a locus of social conflicts, where individual experience transforms itself into a social energy for change.