Is the world really changing all around us?
The other week I wrote something in which I said our grandchildren will expect the world to constantly re-make itself around them … but now I’m wondering if that’s really the case. Maybe we just need to take a step back and look at the bigger picture.
If “change” is a new website, a new device, a new service, then yes: change is happening all the time, at a rate that would have boggled the mind of those farming-the-land-of-our-forefathers men and women who came before us. Something new is announced by the day, hour, minute. It’s impossible to keep up with technology, as anyone who bought a new product from Apple will tell you a few months later, when the even newer model comes out.
But maybe this is how people felt when the plow was invented. First a stick in the dirt, then a sharpened stick, then a stick being dragged by a mule — “What will happen next? Farming is changing every day! The world is upside down!”
But we look back on that dispassionately and say, “They were inventing the plow.”
Maybe all of the change swarming around us is the invention of a single thing. And because we’re too close to it, we can’t see the meta-trend. We see cloud computing, mobility, cybersecurity, Google Wallet, self-driving cars, and it feels like the parade at the end of the Beatles Rock Band intro. But really, maybe our grandchildren won’t be dizzied by this change. They’ll just look back and say, “They were discovering ‘—–‘.”
Call it ‘Connection,’ if you want; the connection of information and people, digital and physical, or time and space … maybe all of this change is just one big Connecting, and maybe all of this change isn’t as scary as it seems sometimes, after all.