In normal everyday life, time is a liquid that flows around us all unceasingly — a kind of existential syrup. During election season, this syrup is captured, boiled down, dehydrated and separated into its constituent grains — grains that we like to call, without fail, ‘‘moments.’’ Thus Donald Trump is (according to The New York Times) ‘‘the man of the moment,’’ and although he was briefly ‘‘out-­Foxed’’ (according to The Belfast Telegraph) ‘‘by a Megyn moment’’ (Jim Rutenberg's coinage in this magazine), he went on to recover with a ‘‘big, symbolic moment’’ (according to Mark Halperin on the ‘‘Today’’ show) at the Iowa State Fair. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, might be having an ‘‘Al Capone moment’’ with regard to the legality of her private email server (The Washington Post), but she still found time to have a ‘‘celebrity moment’’ (The Times again) by taking a selfie with Kim Kardashian and Kanye West. No nexus of events is too large or heterogeneous — no geopolitical weather too swirlingly turbulent — to avoid being reduced to the shorthand of the moment.

As the election grinds on, the names attached to such moments will change. Marco Rubio might succeed Trump as the official man of the moment; Al Gore might have his Lazarus moment. The only thing we can be certain of is that the moments will arrive, incessantly, and that when they do, they will be collected, labeled neatly and displayed for public consumption. We are living in the moment moment.

Modern media-­saturated humans didn’t invent the concept of the moment, of course. Our obsession with it probably goes back, as most modern obsessions do, to the ancient Greeks. The Greeks had at least two different notions of time: chronos (the vast, inhuman, infinite stretch of time) and kairos (the moment). A boring old hour — 15 degrees on the sundial, 60 soulless ticks of the clock — is a little patch of chronos. Kairos, on the other hand, is where the magic happens: those decisive instants in which the world suddenly changes. Kairos is significant time, charged time, heavenly time. It transcends calendars, soaks everything in meaning.

Life requires both chronos and kairos. Most of the juice, however, is in kairos. Humans are addicted to it. We want our magic moments. And we get them. The heroes of our action movies dramatize it. The singers of our songs melodize it. Evangelists preach it. Advertisers pitch it. The modern news media is a kairos factory; everything must always be at stake. And political speech, especially near elections, is all about declaring that we live in a special moment in which everything depends on our very next choice. Back in 2008, in the days of Hope and Change, Barack Obama was a serious kairos-­monger. ‘‘We meet at one of those defining moments,’’ he said in accepting the Democratic presidential nomination. ‘‘This moment, this moment, this election is our chance to keep, in the 21st century, the American promise alive.’’