Are We All Just Being Cry-Babies?

Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock was published in 1970.  The book sold over 6 million copies and convinced many people that they were victims of “too much change in too short a period of time.”  Toffler (keying-off television, air travel and the Pill in particular) preached that social and technological change was leading to information overload.

Not only was Future Shock an elegant summary of what many people were feeling, but it was also the start of a kind of class of angst-filled non-fiction which, for lack of a better term, might be termed the genre of future-shock.

James Gleick’s smart and funny Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything would fall into that category.  The author carried forward Toffler’s thread to say that many of us are now experiencing a kind of hurry sickness coupled with a simultaneous fragmentation and overloading of human attention.

A booming industry in time management has grown up around these fears.  Stephen Covey identified an urgency addition that causes us to be extremely efficient at getting a lot of things done, but often ineffective at getting the right things done.

Today, it’s hard to find anyone anywhere who doesn’t believe that change, especially technological change, continues to accelerate, and that we are often its unhappy victims.  Some of this is in the form of new products (smart phones, apps, entertainment products), changes in traditional industries (newspapers, publishing, car buying, music, banking), enhancements in measuring things (GPS, biometrics) and much of it in the form of social networking and communications (email, texts, tweets, blogs, on-line communities).   

So, is technology moving faster?  The answer is undoubtedly “yes.”  There are more smart people with more time and money and better networks and greater competition than ever before, and they are creating new stuff at an accelerated pace.

The more interesting question to me, however, is this: Relative to our parents, grandparents and ancestors, are we really living in a faster, more stressful world?  (To which I might add, : Or are we just being big old, super-coddled, historically ignorant cry-babies?  As in: “Oh, my email is killing me!”  “Ouch, I’m being friended by people I don’t even know!”  “Cheesh, I can’t escape my phone!”  "Gadzooks, my industry is being disintermediated!" “Yikes, I’m being inundated by ‘nowness.’”)

Looking at Some History

Every so often I run into a bit of history that makes me think we really don’t have clue one as to the kind of speed and stress some of our not-so-distant ancestors felt during their lives.

Here’s a good example.  At the laying of the cornerstone of the Bunker Hill monument in 1825, 50 years after the battle, the keynote speaker was Daniel Webster.  One of the great orators of his day, Webster waxed eloquent about the new nation and its accomplishments.  But listen closely to what he said about the pace of change in his life:

What an extraordinary age we live in!  Events so various and so important that they might distinguish centuries are compressed within the compass of a single life.  When has it happened that history had so much to record in the same term of years, as since the 17^th of June, 1775?  Our Revolution, which might have entailed a war of half a century, has been achieved in a few years; 24 sovereign States have been established. . .Two or three million of inhabitants have been augmented to 12,000,000 citizens.  The great forests of the West are prostrated by the exertions of successful industry, and the dwellers on the banks of the Ohio and the Mississippi have become the fellow-citizens and neighbors of those who cultivate the hills of New England. . . .

There’s much more, but you get the idea.  This was the age of Rip Van Winkle (“for the whole twenty years had been to him but as one night”), when people woke up to a world turned upside-down.  This was also the age when the canal and post office and political parties changed life everywhere.  And, lest we think technology was not on the move, in the period from the Battle of Bunker Hill to Webster’s fiftieth anniversary speech, the following were conceived or commercialized: the submarine, steamboat, circular saw, spinning mule, hot air balloon, bifocals, shrapnel shell, power loom, automatic flour mill, threshing machine, artificial teeth, vaccinations, lithography, gas stove, morphine, locomotive, arc lamp, stethoscope, bicycle, electric motor, electromagnets and Portland cement.

There is at least one commentator that believes the real technology of choice during this period was alcohol; in 1825, the average American over 15 years old consumed seven gallons of alcohol per year, mostly whiskey and hard cider.  (Compare this to two gallons per year now, mostly from beer and wine.)   It's hard not to think that the average American dealt with intense social and technological change in 1825 by staying constantly pickled.  (This same commentator thinks the sitcom was the numbing technology of choice through the 50s and 60s.  I'm thinking currently it might be the dazed hours spent with mishegas on Facebook.)   

Note, too, that most Americans (and most human beings, for that matter) in 1825 were farmers.  Think about the speed and stress of having to feed your family every year in a world without weather forecasting, a world full of insects and floods and blight.  Knowing where your next meal is coming from is a powerful way of slowing down the world that many of us take for granted.

(“Yes, but I barely have time to read all my blogs!”)

A Little More History

Last fall we had the chance to see the Boston Symphony, and one of its selections that evening was by Rachmaninoff.  I glanced at his bio and read: “Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff was born in Semyonovo, district of Starorusky, Russia, on April 1, 1873, and died in Beverly Hills, California, on March 28, 1943.”

Think about that for a moment.  Here is a person who grew up under Czar Nicholas II in a world where few people had indoor plumbing, and died under Franklin Roosevelt in a world that had conceived the computer.  He was one of millions of immigrants displaced by war and revolution. (Want speed and stress?  Flee a country under threat of death, give up everything, and land in a new country without family, income or language.)  Rachmaninoff is a person who saw the invention of jeans, barbed wire, heroin, electric street cars, DDT, carpet sweepers, loudspeakers, telephones, phonographs, cathode ray tubes, cash registers, safety razors, seismographs, metal detectors, electric fans, blowtorches, AC induction motors, linotype, punch cards, trolleys, automobiles, machine guns, dishwashers, cameras, ballpoint pens, zippers (!), aircraft, radios, X-rays, diesel engines, tape recorders, air conditioners, tractors, helicopters, cellophane (and I’m not up to 1910 yet).   How about, just to round things out, the radar, television, antibiotics, the microwave, nylon, jet engines, and sliced bread!   And Rachmaninoff only missed the Slinky by two years!

 

(“Yes, but my computer won’t boot and my iPhone apps won’t download!  I’m completely stressed this morning.”)

Just a Little More History

I’ve been reading a lot about New Orleans after Reconstruction, when the KKK and White League and legislature and courts changed the lives of Blacks and Creoles every single day.  This was essentially the same period that Rachmaninoff lived, so along with all the technology change noted above, African-Americans in New Orleans (and much of the American South) experienced the relentless chipping away of civil and human rights, a kind of constant, paralyzing stress that most of us can hardly imagine.

So, Are We Just Being Cry-Babies or What?

In fact, I do believe the world is moving faster than it used to, in large part because of technology.  But does this sense of speed place our generation under some profound level of stress that never before existed?

Consider Webster, Rachmaninoff, a Creole in 1895 New Orleans or my fellow, 21^st-century technology citizens.  The first could wake up with a toothache in the morning and be dead that week of an abscess, or see his family starve due to flooded crops.  The second could be born under a Russian czar before the advent of electricity and die thousands of miles from his homeland in a democracy with jet planes flying overhead and movie stars driving by his house.  The third could lose his job, seat on the trolley, voting rights and schools overnight. 

The last has too much incoming email, a sense that he isn’t able to concentrate well anymore, lacks the time to read all his blogs or keep up with his on-line social networking, sees more of his customers migrating to the web, and lives with a nagging fear of future shock.  He (and she) also has insurance, healthcare, weather forecasting, a stable government, econometrics, a national bank, a bill of rights, supermarkets, decent retirement communities, Medicare, newspapers, worker’s comp, the FDIC, TV, bifocals that work, dentists who use Novocain, shoes that fit, and a Starbucks on every corner.  Oh, and the time to write about and debate how he's feeling about the future.

Not having to fear growing old is another kind of stress reliever, by the way, that we have come to take for granted.  (In its place we fear getting wrinkles and grey hair, and growing bald.)

Here’s the really powerful thing about 21^st-century technology: It still comes with an “Off” switch.  Flood and blight didn’t.  Political upheaval didn’t.  Segregation didn’t.  In other words, if our 21^st-century lives really are faster, it’s speed so far up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs that most of us are getting nosebleeds from the altitude, not windburn from the pace.

Which means our generation should be able to deal with the speed of change.  There will be a lot of blubbering and angst and lots of future-shock literature in the meantime, but we seem to come from hardy stock.  Hardy enough, anyway, to turn off our phones and read a book, or have a real conversation.  Hardy enough to use the “Off” switch. 

And, failing that, there's always that two gallons per year in reserve.

Posted by Entrepreneur Generations

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