Experience of Time and Subjective Age When Facing a Limited Lifetime: The Case of Older Adults with Advanced Cancer

Objectives We addressed two questions: (1) Does advanced cancer in later life affect a person’s awareness of time and their subjective age? (2) Are awareness of time and subjective age associated with distress, perceived quality of life, and depression? Methods We assessed patients suffering terminal cancer (OAC, n = 91) and older adults free of any life-threatening disease (OA, n = 89), all subjects being aged 50 years or older. Results Older adults with advanced cancer perceived time more strongly as being a finite resource and felt significantly older than OA controls. Feeling younger was meaningfully related with better quality of life and less distress. In the OA group, feeling younger was also associated to reduced depression. Perceiving time as a finite resource was related to higher quality of life in the OA group. Discussion Major indicators of an older person’s awareness of time and subjective aging differ between those being confronted with advanced cancer versus controls.

Lines

Chapter 2 considers how the arrangement of poems into lines creates a sense of rhythm and affects the experience of time for the reader or listener. It introduces the concept of parallelism as a form of repetition that is prevalent in the biblical corpus and emphasizes the different ways parallelism can be put to use. It also considers the presence of enjambment in biblical poetry and the variety of relationships that are possible between the syntax of individual sentences and the lines of a poem. It ends with a reading of Psalm 19 that shows how lineation is one of the primary formal techniques that contribute to the aesthetics of the poem.

Still Point of the Turning World

Schubert’s late instrumental music evokes a distinctive time-sense which not only expands the expressive potential of stylistic norms, but also invites deeper reflections on the relationship between the self and the world through his multilayered construction of temporal consciousness. The sense of now, towards which past and future gravitate, is particularly salient. In this article, I examine the formal, harmonic, topical processes through which Schubert constructs a vivid sense of the now in two movements from his late period, D. 956/ii and D. 959/ii, through the lens of phenomenology, drawing on conceptions of time as formulated by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. I aim to bridge two fields together: first, the general theory of musical time, as has been delineated by Kramer, Barry and Clifton, which examines concepts such as linearity/nonlinearity, silence and stasis; and second, the scholarship on late Schubert, with key conceptual tools such as landscape, late style, lyricism, songfulness and interiority, formulated in the works of Adorno, Burnham, Mak and Taylor. I will also provide the cultural context of musical time in the early-nineteenth century, focusing on the wider paradigm shift from form-as-architecture to form-as-process in music. My analysis reflects a phenomenological orientation within a hermeneutic, narrative mode. I highlight the often disorienting subjective experience of time as evoked by moments that deflect from norms and expectations, specifically the tension between the transient nature of music and the sense of permanence evoked through Schubert’s cyclic, paratactic procedures. I then show how Schubert’s construal of temporal consciousness acquires a historiographical import and resonates with the broader intellectual world by framing it in terms of Schlegel’s three stages of history. I conclude by promoting phenomenological approaches in analysing Schubert’s works and nineteenth-century music at large.

The End of Resilience? Managing Vulnerability Through Temporal Resourcing and Resisting

We induce a first-person conceptualization of entrepreneurial resilience. Our seven-year, two-study ethnography shows that entrepreneurs enact resilience as a four-step process of managing vulnerability: they richly experience episodes of adversity, self-monitor across episodes, reassess personal thresholds and reconcile challenges with coping skills. Entrepreneurs manage vulnerability by (1) modifying ( stretching and shrinking) objective time and (2) changing their subjective experience of time as working with or against the clock through temporal resourcing or temporal resisting. We extend the theory and practice of entrepreneurial resilience by elaborating the interplay of objective and subjective time in managing vulnerability in recurrent and unprecedented crises.

How do Past, Present and Future Weigh into Trajectories of Precarity? The Time Perspectives of Young Psychoactive Substance Users Living in Situations of Social Precarity in Montreal

Young psychoactive substance users in social precarity are vulnerable to a range of health and social issues. Time perspective is one aspect to consider in supporting change. This study draws on the views expressed by young adults to portray their subjective experience of time, how this perception evolves and its implications for their substance use and socio-occupational integration trajectories. The sample includes 23 young psychoactive substance users ( M = 24.65 years old; 83% male) in social precarity frequenting a community-based harm reduction centre. Thematic analysis of the interviews reveals the past to be synonymous with disappointment and disillusionment, but also a constructive force. Participants expressed their present-day material and human needs as well as their need for recognition and a sense of control over their own destiny. Their limited ability to project into the future was also discussed. Avenues on how support to this population might be adapted are suggested.

Music, Evolution, and the Experience of Time

This chapter explores the psychological structure and perception of time in music in light of recent theoretical discussion and proposals for specific features of the human faculty for music—qualities that are at once universally present and operational in music across cultures whilst also being unique to our species and to the domain of music. The author contends that music’s architectural foundations—configurations of musical pulse, musical tone, and musical motivation—provide a sustained attentional structure for managing personal experience and interpersonal interaction and offer a continually renewing phenomenological link between the immediate past, the perceptual present and future expectation. A crucial and distinguishing feature of our experience with music is thus the particular way in which we share intersubjective time and enact and create an extended moment by constantly merging from one perceptual present into the next.

Lost in time: rethinking duration estimation outside the brain.

Our perception of the passage of time can suffer from significant distortions as time flies when we are busy and drags when we are bored. A prominent mechanistic model proposes that this perceptual volatility reflects changes in the activity dynamics of distributed neuronal ensembles referred to as population clocks because they encode time. In this framework, time is understood similarly to space (both can be segmented in seconds or centimeters) and duration estimation is primarily internal (the brain tells time). Here, I challenge this framework from the angle of Bergson’s proposal that the inner experience of time is unlike space because it is ever-changing and indivisible (2 successive seconds are not experienced equivalently). Quantifying and communicating this inner experience requires its externalization and immobilization through distance measurements derived from stereotyped movements and spatial metaphors (“short/long” durations; time “flies/drags”), which explains the habit of thinking time like space. In support of Bergson’s proposal, humans and animals heavily rely on movements in a variety of duration estimation tasks and the neural underpinnings of duration estimates overlap those of motor control and spatial navigation. Thus, philosophical and empirical arguments question whether duration estimation is fundamentally internal. Rather than being explained by ad hoc changes in the speed of population clocks, the puzzle of the volatility of time perception might resolve itself by considering that living beings lack the ability to internally measure time, which they compensate through interactions with regularities afforded by the world and symbolic representation drawn from space.

Socioeconomic Status, Time Scarcity and Well-Being in Retirement

We tend to think of retirement as a great equalizer when it comes to relief from the pernicious time scarcity characterizing the lives of many individuals in the labor force. Puzzlingly, this is not entirely the case. Using data from the MTUS (N=15,390) in combination with long-term participant observation (980 hours) and in-depth interviews (N=53), I show that socioeconomic characteristics are important determinants of retiree time scarcity. Neighborhood disadvantage gets under the skin via time exchanges that are forged by both neighborhood and peer network characteristics. The SES-based ‘time projects of surviving and thriving’ undergirding the experience of time scarcity lead to divergent strategies of action and differing consequences for well-being. For the advantaged, the experience of time scarcity is protective for well-being in later life, as it emerges from the ‘work of thriving’ and managing a relative abundance of choices. For the disadvantaged, the later life experience of time scarcity is shaped by cumulative inequality, further exacerbating inequalities in well-being. The final section of the article offers an analysis and interpretation of these results, putting retiree time scarcity in conversation with the broader literature on socioeconomic status and well-being.

Something Happened to the Future

This article stands in Reinhart Koselleck’s tradition of investigating the historical experience of time. It focuses on the manner in which the experience and conceptualization of the future changed in Dutch parliamentary speech between 1814 and 2018. Based on a quantitative analysis of a corpus of political texts of more than 800 million tokens spanning more than two centuries, we argue that the future transformed from something unknown but principally predictable into a synonym for change itself during the final quarter of the twentieth century. We contend that this resulted in unpredictability becoming the future’s defining trait and the future, consequently, losing its character as a knowledgeable singular in a process of what can be called “de-singularization.”