We are living in the middle of an epidemic, one of those viruses that we’ve spread everywhere, almost without noticing. Yet we’ve adapted so well, it seems to have been with us forever. We live in and around it, hardly even feeling its symptoms anymore. Like so many plagues, this one is iatrogenic, medicine-induced. Our cleanest instruments have produced an illness worse than the one they treat, infecting us with the contagion of real time.

In real time, each day’s every transaction is listed on the global exchange. Strangers with whom we are inextricably linked buy and sell futures on everything we do or fail to do. In real time, we are forever losing massive fortunes worth of squandered opportunity.

In real time, every second counts. Every minute must be maximized. Since we cannot stop the escaping moments, we have our machines give us the next best thing: two moments, crammed into one. Split screen. Multitasking. Mobile wireless voicemail message forwarding. RSS feeds. Picture-in-a-picture. We need miss nothing. In fact, we can’t.

In real time, every pleasure and pain plays out in public. Our most intimate fears are blogged and annotated with real-time communal comments a thousand times a day, retrievable anytime from anywhere, at least for the time being. Everything we put our hand to is collectively evaluated, its Amazon User Stars continuously updated, in real time. We are kept in every loop, current on every development: Film of the Year, record of the month, personality of the day, scandal of the minute.

Real time guarantees that we’re always reachable, always up to date, always immersed in the unfolding world image, never alone, never outside the surging current of data intent on moving us ever farther downstream. In real time, we live in two minds, three tenses, and four continents at once, and buy back the bits lost in transit with frequent flier miles.

In short, we have grown so good at mastering time that nanoseconds now weigh heavy on our hands. And still, time stays, and we go . . .