If you do not like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.
The advancing rate of change has massively impacted humanity. When I was a child, things definitely changed, but it was nowhere near as much, and it did not seem to happen as quickly as things are changing now.
I was fortunate to grow up with a father who loved all the cool new gadgets. When I was 9, we used to have a giant green box in our living room and it was the mono speaker that connected to the turntable so that my parents could listen to their music with significant volume and really get into the music.
By the time I was 10, that green box subdivided into two boxes which were put in opposite corners of the living room because music was stereo, and it sounded so much better spreading the sound across the room. (Wait till I brought home Dark Side of the Moon a few years later!❤️)
I could call out 1000 instances of things that changed as a new technological platform or world circumstance created that change.
The change, however, was spread out over much more manageable timelines. It afforded any of us who wished to stay atop of the change, ample room to learn and adapt our behaviors.
Change was welcomed, and it’s impact was almost always positive. This continued for a couple decades and watching evolutions like records becoming reel to reel tapes, 8 track cassettes, audio cassette, and on to CDs, were all evolutions that we, as consumers readily appreciated. During the same period of time, we as end-users, were liberated from having to get off of the couch to change the channels, plus we had many new channels to watch. Telephones were liberated from land lines to cellular devices which had a massive revolutionary stream and the dawn of personal computers lit the bonfire that was to follow. No longer would we be satisfied with our Texas instrument advanced calculator which could magically and instantaneously execute the most complicated student-level math formulas.
The liberation of the phone from a fixed location and the advent of the personal computer escalated everything exponentially and the rate of change that we had previously been in tune with, was suddenly going four times faster out of nowhere.
If the challenge of getting to the point where we were four times faster at adapting was not adequate enough, along came the Internet and flattened out the Earth into a level playing field for people in many countries to compete against one another in ways that here to for, had been impossible.
For the first couple years of the Internet, it was a vogue. I remember talking to my studio clients about it and suggesting that we start building a new thing called a website and they laughed and told me that this was just a fad and had nothing to do with the entertainment industry. With raised eyebrows and a certain degree of internal petulance, I acquiesced to their statements. I remember during the same period of time that we were all starting to add this new thing called email onto our computers and we were discovering that if you bought a very very expensive computer ($35,000 for a Quadra FX with an external 2GB hard drive to store years worth of files🤣) you could do photographic manipulation, which for the Illusion Factory, was about as catalytic as anything that has ever impacted my life.
By now, it’s around 1995 and the Internet is starting to make some significant headway from a 28K modem or a 56K modem to more advanced capabilities. AOL and EarthLink are dominating the online and email space until other challengers and platforms like Yahoo and came along on Netscape Navigator and then Internet explorer to provide alternate opportunity. This, of course, gave way to Google, and suddenly all information was at your fingertips
As a planet, we all readily embraced this new reality and accelerated into it but as with any kind of change, there were unexpected, undesired ramifications that were going to put their thumb on the scales of our reality.
The massive proliferation of media, liberated the tools to make professional looking content into the hands of every interested consumer. As everybody suddenly became a photographer when their phone facilitated such, and then a filmmaker, the concept of mass media communication diverted into a very unfortunate evolution.
This evolution gave birth to a much more persuasive tool for conspiracy theorists to propagate their illogical and hateful propaganda with a far more convincing flare than had ever been afforded to them in prior years. This has combined with a population that does not necessarily have the educational skills to readily differentiate fact from fiction… and if fiction is delivered with confident execution, it looks so much like the fact, that an ignorant human being can assimilate it as such.
Along came the iPhone which absolutely changed everything. This, paired with wireless Internet was the next quantum change. In 2007, these variables plus Facebook and Twitter and other new catalytic stimuli would all give way to epic evolutions in humanity.
That mono speaker that subdivided into stereo has escalated into billions of permutations. Our ability to keep pace with those permutations is requiring ever greater time periods required.
This acceleration will only get faster and far more impacting than anything that any of us have ever experienced. Any person who does not believe in the theory of evolution should take their cell phone and turn it completely off for one month. Simultaneously, they should disconnect themselves from the Internet And any computers or electronic devices for that same period of time. If 30 days in a completely disconnected state does not convince you that we as a species are evolving, I don’t think anything would.
Given so many new operating systems for your computers and your phones and other devices, the need to continue to learn how to engage with all of this intelligent equipment is time consuming and exhausting so as to make us wish to sit the next change out….except the world doesn’t work like that and as quickly as we adopt that mindset, we start to become irrelevant. That’s a fact. And it is immutable.
Moral of the story, enjoy your life, keep abreast of the changes (some of them are incredibly amazing others unleash monsters), and most importantly, remember that vigilant watch of both is critical for survival🥂😊
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