Felt Duration and the Clock: Temporal Fidelity and the Architecture of Late-Modern Disconnection

Late-modern temporal experience exhibits a specific phenomenology — time felt as scarce despite clock-abundance, biographical extension thinning into rapid passage, the loss of unstructured duration within which felt time could articulate itself — that Hartmut Rosa, Jonathan Crary, and parallel literatures describe with care while leaving the architectural mechanism comparatively underspecified. This paper develops an architectural account by extending the asymmetry argument between compensatory and ambient fidelity provision (Trukovich, 2025e) — which runs on the social axis of inter-individual fidelity — to the temporal axis of fidelity to felt duration. The thesis: contemporary temporal pathology parses as a two-layer fidelity-deficit on the temporal axis. Layer 1 attenuation thins the natural temporal regularities the temporogenic enclosure organizes itself around; Layer 2 substitution displaces felt-duration articulation by clock-time and computational-time as primary frame for cognogenic temporal self-modeling. The captures-pattern from temporogenesis through pre-mechanical timekeeping (sundial, water clock, sand glass) to mechanical and computational clock-time supplies the historical-architectural sequence by which the substitution has progressively obtained, with the mechanical clock identified as the phase change at which supplementation becomes substitution under sufficient saturation. The architectural reading converges with Rosa’s social-acceleration thesis at the phenomenological level and supplies the architectural mechanism Rosa’s sociological account leaves implicit. Normative implications include the bisection of the contemporary slow-living and mindfulness literature into fidelity-restoring and stakes-reducing strands, with only fidelity-restoration constituting framework-licensed response. The account is also positioned against the experimental study of time perception: felt-duration thickness is distinguished from duration estimation and from retrospective tempo judgment, and the finding that the most meaningful periods are remembered as the most fleeting is shown to follow from the distinction between in-the-moment thickness and retrospective appraisal rather than to count against the framework. Empirical commitments include predictions for low-clock-saturation populations, smartphone-saturated cohorts, calendar-app-mediated biographical organization, and intergenerational variation in cognogenic temporal architecture under different saturation conditions.