THE MISANTHROPE’S CORNER ■

AMERICA has a time problem. I don’t mean our obsessive need to “save” time that foreigners have long joked about. We aren’t like that anymore; the American in a hurry has slowed to a crawl and now uses what little Yankee ingenuity he has left to figure out how to get more “leisure” time to spend with his family.

Now that we are no longer speed demons or efficiency freaks, we might reasonably be expected to develop the richer, fuller attitudes toward time that we profess to admire, but the opposite has happened. We are still in a time warp, only this one is even worse than the one we shed. Now it’s not merely clock time but our whole concept of time—past, present, and future and their links to each other—that has been shot to hell.

About the Author

Florence King

Florence King was a contributing editor of National Review.

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AMERICA has a time problem. I don’t mean our obsessive need to “save” time that foreigners have long joked about. We aren’t like that anymore; the American in a hurry has slowed to a crawl and now uses what little Yankee ingenuity he has left to figure out how to get more “leisure” time to spend with his family.

Now that we are no longer speed demons or efficiency freaks, we might reasonably be expected to develop the richer, fuller attitudes toward time that we profess to admire, but the opposite has happened. We are still in a time warp, only this one is even worse than the one we shed. Now it’s not merely clock time but our whole concept of time—past, present, and future and their links to each other—that has been shot to hell.