In 1970, “futurist” Alvin Toffler wrote a book entitled “Future Shock.” In it, he described the way that our society was changing at an ever-increasing rate. Toffler mused on how this accelerated alteration of our reality could cause psychological and perhaps even physical stress. He called this phenomenon “future shock.” The idea was somewhat related to Moore’s Law which originally theorized that the number of transistors in microprocessors doubled about every two years. It was later reduced to 18 months. This is really more of an observation than a “Law” but “law” sounds better. It’s been adopted as a rough estimate of the speed of technological advance. (Moore originally proposed his observation in 1965 and later went on to found Intel).

            Future Shock really caught the public’s attention and the book was a big hit and the term became part of our lexicon. It became pretty standard reading in both environmental and sociological curricula. I’m not sure how popular the term remains but there’s no question about our rapidly changing world affecting us in multiple ways. Still, I’m not sure that it has continued to change faster and faster. It might be that we’ve gotten more used to the constant change or perhaps they aren’t as dramatic.

            It seems to me that maybe the future shock hit the Greatest Generation (roughly defined as those born from 1900 to 1920s) hardest. I offer my father as example. He grew up in a rural upstate New York town. Like most youths of the time, he lived and worked on the family dairy farm. Their family was largely self-sufficient and Dad said they barely noticed the Depression themselves, they’d always lived that way. He did talk about how he was embarrassed at lunch time that he had homemade bread, not the sliced bread of some of his classmates. He knew the local “distiller” who worked up on the hill. He remembered both his family’s first car and first radio. In winter Dad and his brothers and sisters rode to school in a horse-drawn sleigh. (One of my uncles used to hop on the milk train to get into town). By the time he died at 95 he had seen men walk on the moon, flown across the country in a matter of hours and, although he never did get used to computers, seen Mom using email and reading CNN online. He even got the hang of listening to CDs in his later years. Although the rate of change has technically accelerated, I’m not sure I’ve seen quite such startling changes. It seems like most things are a matter of degree not a fundamentally new idea or product. I may not be crazy about self-checkout or streaming everything but they are really just variations of things I’ve seen before. There’s been some great stuff (convenience stores, guitar tuners) but Neil Armstrong on the moon is still probably the most remarkable technological achievment I’ve seen. But tomorrow is another day…