In view of these findings, and many more could be cited, it is not surprising that people have been seized by the longing for a differently lived time. The desire to 'work differently', which also resonates in the public debate about a reduction in working hours, is at the same time a vehicle of the longing for a time which can be structured differently, and which promises an escape from everyday routine and the realization of at least a fraction of those possibilities which is thwarted by the actual expenditure of time. A new departure – but where to and how? Here the paths to Uchronia begin to fork. Both have long since ceased to exist, the remote places, and the fictitious, distant future, created despite temporal discontinuities, in which the ideal society can be outlined, and which cün be dreamed about as a compensation for the present misery, in social, political, moral, and literary terms, whatever the sensitive heart or enlightened reason may desire'.7 Uchronia is now, and it too seeks realization in the extended present.
The first path leads straight into the Cockaigne of full time. If sausages once dropped from the sky in this imaginary land for people racked with famine to eat their fill, then the modern dream of the temporal paradise is full of the magic formula ‘if only I had time for . . .'. The imagination can then run riot, since only two conditions are to be met for the fulfilment of all the wishes it produces: to have more time and, if possible, money too. The poor wish for the means of transport of the rich, and all their luxury in the way of time and money; the fans of free time want to make their pleasures, in which they are led to believe by a uchronically well-versed advertising industry, instantaneously and simultaneously realizable, and contemplative people want a bit of ecologically clean eternity. All want to appease their hunger for time, without ever becoming thirsty again; they want to live faster, more fully, without therefore arriving earlier or empty. More free time: less work; more consumption: more fun; more in the way of life: living differently; so the short formula might run with variations.
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The Longing for the Moment