The present social determination of activity proceeds from an existential linearity that demands that everyone produce something unceasingly in order to justify his belonging to the lifeworld. Time then becomes the sheer succession of possibilities for showing one’s own capacities and overtaking anyone else so as to attain success, which expresses the value of one’s own agency in the lifeworld. Viewed this way, success tends to totalize individual agency, which implies that everyone competes with everyone else and that social dynamics are carried away by an effort to be always efficacious. Now, since this is at variance with the essential finitude of existence, the outcome of success is none other than a permanent excess that reveals the conflictive integration of the self in the lifeworld, which can only be made up for by the strengthening of success, so that the whole process starts again independently of the individual will. Together with this bewildering reiteration, the lifeworld itself offers, however, an alternative experience of time in some marginal activities such as those carried out by satisfying social needs that transcend the individual, by answering a vocation, or by following a desire to express oneself creatively.