Liquid Life

'Liquid life' is the kind of life commonly lived in ourcontemporary, liquid-modern society. Liquid life cannot stay oncourse, as liquid-modern society cannot keep its shape for long.Liquid life is a precarious life, lived under conditions ofconstant uncertainty.

The most acute and stubborn worries that haunt this liquid life arethe fears of being caught napping, of failing to catch up with fastmoving events, of overlooking the 'use by' dates and being saddledwith worthless possessions, of missing the moment calling for achange of tack and being left behind. Liquid life is also shotthrough by a contradiction: it ought to be a (possibly unending)series of new beginnings, yet precisely for that reason it is fullof worries about swift and painless endings, without which newbeginnings would be unthinkable. Among the arts of liquid-modernliving and the skills needed to practice them, getting rid ofthings takes precedence over their acquisition.

This and other challenges of life in a liquid-modern society aretraced and unravelled in the successive chapters of this new bookby one of the most brilliant and original social thinkers of ourtime.