By: Amir Zadenemat

1. The Eroding Present

We live in an era when the present feels porous, as if each moment dissolves before it fully arrives. This sensation is not sudden or catastrophic. It is slow, granular, the effect of time wearing down experience the way water polishes stone—not through force, but through repetition. Days pass quickly yet feel strangely hollow, as if we are watching life from the periphery rather than inhabiting it.

Music evaporates after a single listen, replaced by the next track the algorithm quietly nudges forward. Relationships drift apart before they can collect the sediment of shared memory. Ideas flare briefly, sparking a minor storm online before vanishing into the endless churn. Nothing seems to settle long enough to claim emotional weight.

Permanence, once a quiet aspiration, now feels almost extravagant. It requires care, attention, and—above all—time. But time is increasingly treated as something to spend rather than something to inhabit. We fill it, optimize it, accelerate it. To slow down feels risky, a kind of self-imposed disadvantage in a world that never stops refreshing.

What emerges is a culture moving so quickly it outruns its own meaning. We are present, but thinly. Alive, but lightly. It is a strange condition: to feel the velocity of life increase while the texture of life erodes.

2. The Marketplace of Attention

The engine behind this erosion is deceptively simple: we now live in an economy where attention—not labor, not material goods—is the central commodity. Not long-term, contemplative attention, but fragmented attention: the kind that can be monetized in seconds.

Durability is inefficient in such a system. A long novel is harder to monetize than a short, startling thread online. A deep friendship cannot be easily commodified, while a network of superficial digital interactions produces continuous engagement. A complex song with a slow build risks losing the listener during its opening bars.

And so the system prunes. It trims away anything that delays the moment of capture.

*   Songs leap to their chorus.

*   Videos remove narrative breathing space.

*   Articles front-load their surprises.

*   Newsfeeds prioritize shock, not clarity.

We encounter a world engineered to seize attention in the first few seconds and to release it just as quickly for the next object in line. The effect is cultural thinness: everything feels immediate yet unsubstantial, vivid yet quickly forgotten. Our days are full, but our memory of them is faint.

3. The Moral Pressure of Speed

This acceleration has seeped from the structural to the moral. It is no longer enough to simply live quickly; one must appear to be living quickly. Speed becomes a marker of competence, relevance, even intelligence.

We have come to judge ourselves through the tempo of our responses: how quickly we reply, how quickly we produce, how quickly we adapt to each shift in the collective attention. The fear of missing out—originally a personal anxiety—has evolved into a cultural expectation. To pause is to fall behind.

This ethic of speed reshapes our virtues. Patience begins to seem like passivity. Loyalty like naïveté. Depth like inefficiency. A relationship that asks for slow growth feels indulgent. A creative project that resists immediate payoff feels irresponsible. Everything competes with the next thing, not on quality but on velocity.

In this world, slowness becomes a kind of quiet rebellion. Stillness becomes rare enough to feel sacred.

4. Liquid Selves

Acceleration reshapes not only our culture but our identities. When everything around us is temporary, the self becomes temporary as well. We curate rather than develop, selecting and discarding micro-identities at the pace of the feed.

Identity becomes liquid: adaptable, yes, but also unstable. We change avatars, aesthetics, opinions, even values with surprising ease, often without noticing the shift. When the self is continuously revised, nothing attached to it can be expected to endure.

Commitments wobble. Preferences cycle. Beliefs become interchangeable. Our personal histories lose weight; our personal futures become vague. We live in a perpetual present tense of reinvention, which is exhilarating at first but ultimately exhausting.

A self that is always beginning can never arrive.

5. Music Designed to Vanish

Music reveals the temporal logic of its era better than any other art form. Ours is the age of the three-second hook. Songs are no longer composed to unfold; they are composed to compete—for the listener’s first glance, not their lasting loyalty.

This does not mean the music is bad. Many contemporary songs are remarkable in their precision. But they are built for speed. They hit quickly, fade quickly, and are replaced quickly. The stream never stops flowing long enough for a song to sink roots into our memory.

We listen to more music than any generation before us, yet we carry less of it with us. Our playlists grow ever longer, but our internal soundtrack grows fainter. In a sense, we have outsourced our musical memory to the algorithm.

When music becomes ephemeral, it is not just the songs we lose—it is the emotional architecture they once helped us build.

6. Disposable Intimacy

Relationships have been restructured by the same forces. The technologies that enable connection also enable constant replacement. A swipe can start something, but it can also end something.

Intimacy—true intimacy—requires a commitment to duration. It needs repetition, shared time, and a willingness to endure the unglamorous phases of closeness. But we now approach relationships with the mindset of software trials: test quickly, assess compatibility, and if resistance appears, uninstall.

As a result, we are socially abundant but emotionally undernourished. We have wider networks than ever, yet the depth of those networks is alarmingly shallow. We begin many connections but rarely finish them. We keep our options open and our attachments provisional.

The tragedy is not that we fail to connect. It is that we forget how.

7. Ideas That Don’t Stay Long Enough to Matter

Ideas, like everything else, have accelerated. They no longer pass through the slow stages of argument, refinement, and acceptance. Instead, they flare and fade with viral speed.

A theory rises by noon, is debated by afternoon, ridiculed or celebrated by evening, and replaced by morning. Ideas are no longer foundations; they are content. They function as sparks, not structures.

This velocity carries a cost: ideas lose the chance to mature. They do not gather the layers of debate that once gave them durability. A society that cannot sustain the lifespan of an idea cannot engage in long-term thinking. It lives cognitively in bursts, incapable of building intellectual continuity.

Knowledge without duration becomes noise.

8. The Evaporating World

The philosopher Gilles Deleuze foresaw a world governed not by rigid institutions but by endless modulation—a society where power flows rather than confines. In such a world, individuals are kept in constant motion, unable to find the stillness necessary for reflection or resistance.

Acceleration becomes its own form of control. What moves too fast cannot be examined. What cannot be examined cannot be resisted.

We live inside this dynamic. Information flows so rapidly that we struggle to remember what mattered last week. Outrage cycles reset before understanding can form. The ground beneath us feels unstable, not because it collapses but because it never stops shifting.

This is the evaporating world: vivid, immediate, and constantly dissolving.

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9. The Weight of the Moment: The Refusal of Acceleration in Kurosawa’s *Ikiru* (Expanded Section)

Our preceding sections described contemporary life as being dominated by the **Moral Pressure of Speed** and the **Marketplace of Attention**, leading to the creation of **Liquid Selves**. To find the escape hatch from this state of temporariness, we must look to those who discover lasting meaning within the heart of absolute meaninglessness.

Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 film, *Ikiru* (To Live), offers a profound, tragic, yet ultimately redemptive case study of this struggle. Its protagonist, Kanji Watanabe, is the perfect example of the pre-diagnosis **Liquid Self** caught in the inertia of a rigid system. He is a senior bureaucrat in a Japanese municipal office who has spent twenty years signing documents, rubber-stamping proposals, and perfecting the art of passing the buck. He is a man who is literally alive, yet metaphorically dead—a ghost in the **Society of Control** described by Deleuze, which operates through sheer, non-productive repetition.

9.1. The Anatomy of Static Death

Watanabe’s office is the antithesis of modern social acceleration; it is a monument to bureaucratic sludge. Yet, it embodies the ultimate failure of **Hartmut Rosa’s theory of social acceleration**: a state where speed exists not as a force of progress, but as a circular, self-canceling motion. The movement of papers in his office is an acceleration that never leads to *anything*, rendering it a kind of temporal stagnation. Watanabe himself is defined by **acceleration toward aging** rather than **acceleration toward action**. His body is frail, his voice a whisper, his existence absent.

The diagnosis of stomach cancer rips him out of this systemic inertia. He suddenly understands that his life, which was only *filled* with temporary, meaningless tasks, is now **truly temporary**. His fear of death is not merely the fear of an end, but the existential dread of a **death without having lived**.

9.2. The Folly of Consumptive Escape

In the face of impending demise, Watanabe’s first impulse is to seek meaning in fleeting consumption—the very promise of the **Marketplace of Attention** economy. He spends his savings, drinks heavily, and seeks out the fleeting, vivid pleasures of Tokyo’s nightlife, desperate to *buy* an experience of life. This phase of the film functions as a stark critique of distraction (*divertissement*) and the modern quest for instantaneous gratification. He attempts to become a **Liquid Consumer**, but discovers that no amount of ephemeral pleasure can fill his decades-long void.

The turning point occurs when he is in a nightclub, singing the poignant “Gondola no Uta,” a song about the brevity of life and the swift passing of time: “Life is short / Fall in love, maidens / Before the crimson of your lips / Fades, before the tides of passion / Cool in your breasts.” Sung by a man facing his final weeks, the song transforms from romantic melancholy into a profound realization: the recognition of temporariness must be a catalyst for authentic action, not merely a justification for passive consumption.

9.3. The Creation of Permanent Selfhood

Watanabe only finds his direction when he connects with Toyo, a young colleague who had resigned from the municipal office to take a job in a factory making toy rabbits. Toyo, who was miserable in the soul-deadening office, is now cheerful in a physically exhausting but **meaningful** job. When Watanabe asks why, she explains that she is happy because **she is producing something**—something tangible and real.

This simple lesson is a direct confrontation with the principles of the **Liquid Self** and the delusion of abstract labor. In our own time, we trade tangible value for the appearance of importance (managing data, producing content). Toyo teaches Watanabe that durability lies in **concrete creation**—in making an impact, however small, that is real.

His purpose becomes clear: to use his remaining life force to push through the bureaucratic maze and build a small children’s playground in a neglected, sewage-filled lot—a project that had been stalled for years in the very system he once served. This choice is the ultimate rejection of the philosophy of **temporariness**:

1.  **Rejection of Consumption:** He directs his remaining funds and time into public welfare, not fleeting personal pleasure.

2.  **Rejection of Speed:** He moves slowly, deliberately, and carefully against the crushing resistance of the administrative system, prioritizing **depth over efficiency**.

3.  **Rejection of the Marketplace of Attention:** His work is quiet, unacknowledged, and focused on genuine public good, not on being seen or rewarded.

9.4. The Image of Durability

The film’s most powerful, unforgettable image—recounted through the testimonies of others—is that of Watanabe on his final night. Sitting alone on a swingset in the newly finished playground, snow falling softly around him, he sings “Gondola no Uta.”

This final moment is a potent symbol of deep contradiction: the **swing** itself is a symbol of motion, of endless to-and-fro, of the perpetual flow of time and the temporariness of existence. Yet, Watanabe, swinging back and forth, is **truly still for the first time in his life.** He is no longer seeking meaning; he is **inhabiting** the meaning he created. The **park** itself stands as a legacy, a small but powerful piece of **permanence** carved out of the urban wilderness for future generations.

Watanabe’s death is not a tragedy, but a philosophical victory. By engaging in a persistent, focused, and small act of creation, he nullified the intrinsic meaninglessness of his transient life. *Ikiru* reminds us that in a society geared toward speed and consumption, the small, deliberate, and publicly-oriented act is the only reliable pathway from a **Liquid Self** to a **Durable Self**.

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10. A Life That Doesn’t Evaporate

If everything around us accelerates, then resisting acceleration becomes an act of agency. To live a life that does not evaporate, we must make choices that prioritize depth over speed.

This may mean lingering in conversations that have no measurable productivity. Returning to a book that demands slow reading. Allowing a friendship to endure through its quiet, unremarkable phases. Holding an idea long enough for it to change us. Creating something—anything—that carries our imprint into a future we will not see.

These gestures seem small, but they accumulate. They build a life with weight. A life that holds.

We cannot stop the world from moving quickly. But we can decide whether we move at its pace or at a human pace. We can choose to refresh less and return more. We can choose moments that settle instead of moments that spike.

In an age defined by ephemerality, the most radical act we can commit is to stay long enough for something to matter.

In a world designed to evaporate, we can still choose permanence.

—

References

1.  Deleuze, G. (1992). Postscript on the Societies of Control. *October*, 59, 3–7.

2.  Kurosawa, A. (Director). (1952). *Ikiru* [Film]. Toho.

3.  Rosa, H. (2013). *Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity*. Columbia University Press.

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Amir Zadnemat is a graduate of the Faculty of Literature and Humanities at the University of Guilan.