Time shifts increase our sensitivity to birth and death, to the rise and fall of cultural epochs, by drawing attention to all sorts of changes. When years, decades or centuries turn, there need not necessarily be any corresponding great shift in society and culture. What does ‘real’ history care about dates and years? But our way of measuring time produces a sort of numerical magic that sometimes makes us extra sensitive to collective cultural mobility. In aesthetical production and cultural debate, each time turn induces a wish to reflect upon where we stand and what is happening. This sharpened time consciousness may accelerate or consolidate certain changes, if sufficiently many and strong social forces engage in the reflection to transform prophecies into effective mechanisms of change, by the material power of self-definitions.