Starting with a single observation, that no one seems to have time anymore, best-selling author Heather Menzies pulls the connecting threads to unravel the crisis of meaning and accountability threatening to paralyze society today. Seeing a link between various diseases of our times -- from stress and depression among adults to Attention Deficit Disorder in kids -- Menzies argues that what is happening to people is also happening to institutions and society at large: the same inner disintegration of focus, the same chopping up and abbreviation of relationships, the same sense of being so scattered that itís hard to know whatís real and what matters anymore.

Somewhere between the multi-tasking pace and the sea of data divorced from real life, weíre losing touch with ourselves and with each other. Weíre even losing a sense of how to tell when things go wrong and how to take action when they do. We need to take back our lives, and renew the humanity of our social institutions. Itís an ideas book, a piece of speculative non-fiction, and it speaks directly to what lies beneath the surface of many issues confronting society today.