When is it “appropriate” to move out of your parents’ house? Are you “behind” in life if you haven’t gotten married by the time you hit thirty? Why is it so hard to balance career and family, and what does it say about us if we can’t? 

In Part 2 of Clock-Blocked, Bronwen continues to examine how social rules are impacted by cultural orientation to time. Tackling a variety of time-related issues, like birthday depression, social clocks, motherhood, and how silence can be a useful “tool” to manipulate time in conversations, Bronwen points out how dangerous certain social rules can be to our collective mental health. 

Elicia and Rayan offer further insight into the cultural differences between France and America, how to manage a transatlantic relationship, and  what, if not “money,” time is in France.


Key Points From This Episode:

• What are the “birthday blues,” and why they are so common in Western society. 
• What the symptoms of birthday depression are.
• How future-orientation takes the fun out of growing older.
• Why birthdays have different significance as we grow older, and how our temporal orientations shift by age. 
• What some important milestones on the American social clock are.
• Attitudes toward aging and their impact on health and wellbeing. 
• The threat to mental health presented by the pressure to conform to social clocks. 
• Changes in marriage trends across the decades.
• Who Edward Hall was. 
• What the definition of “chronemics” is. 
• Why the tempo of life is different in industrialized countries. 
• How the pace of life is determined by economic health, geographical location, and temperature. 
• What the AAQ is and why it is important for evaluating mental health in older adults.
• Why America is afraid of aging. 
• What the difference is between a birth cohort and a generation.
• The different meanings of silence and why it makes us so uncomfortable. 
• Insight into why and how we “wait.” 

Links

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Them's the Rules Website