Future Shock

Who remembers this book? Future Shock by Alvin Toffler was published in 1970 and became a world-wide bestseller. My father's copy dates from August 1981 and I read it a few years later, around the time I finished secondary school.

The pocket edition counts 490 pages. The English is well-written. The table of contents is nice to read: it counts many well-chosen subtitles, like "Flamenco in Sweden", "The Paper Wedding Gown" and "The Mournful Movers".

The book is not a utopian description of how the future should be, but  rather a futurist description of how it will be. The title Future Shock refers to an illness: "Just as the body cracks under the strain of environmental overstimulation, the 'mind' and its decision processes behave erratically when overloaded. By indiscriminately racing the engines of change, we may be undermining not merely the health of those least able to adapt, but their very ability to act rationally on their own behalf".

Alvin Toffler's vision on economists is still very relevant today: "The year 2000 is closer to us (in 1970!) than the Great Depression, yet the world's economists, traumatised by that historic disaster, remain frozen in the attitudes of the past....If it were possible to pry from their brains their collective image of the economy of, say, the year 2025, it would look very much like that of 1970-only more so."

Many family tendencies like gay marriage are already anticipated in this book. Toffler also writes: "Men and women today are often torn in a conflict between a commitment to career and a commitment to children."

Concerning politics, Toffler writes: "We are rushing toward a fateful breakdown of the entire system of political representation. If legislatures are to survive at all, they will need new links with their constituencies, new ties with tomorrow."

The odd thing is that this book doesn't mention mobile phones and internet. In those days, the fax was the emerging communication technology! Nevertheless, Alvin Toffler imagines a machine called OLIVER, read the extract below and compare with our Internet.

We can conclude that most of today's general tendencies were already emerging long ago, longer ago than we tend to believe today. On the other hand, the specific technical developments and especially the order in which they spread over the world, seemed much harder to predict.

The Virtue of Patience and the 10000 Hour Rule

Patience is an underrated virtue. In our age, everything seems to be within reach. As a consequence, we live in a time of hyperactivity and continuous tantalising. And yet, as Maria Popova points out in her marvellous blog 10Learnings from 10 Years of Brain Pickings, “Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time.” What could be really worthwhile? I would consider education, acquiring knowledge and skills, but also: good human relationships and peace.

Concerning education and the acquisition of knowledge and skills, many students and young graduates suffer from a lack of patience rather than a lack of talent. Malcolm Gladwell mentions in his book  Outliers the 10,000 hour rule: you need to collect around 10,000 hours of practice if you really want to be good at something. The rule is certainly valid for hardware and software developers, but also for practitioners of the higher arts like musicians and painters.

There are two serious issues with patience. The first one is that not all stakeholders may show the same patience for the same purpose. As a result, your project can be cancelled, not because you didn’t have enough patience, but rather because someone else didn’t have enough patience (e.g. your teacher or your manager). This is also the case in peace negotiations: if one party doesn’t have enough patience, the peace process stops and war restarts. War is always a consequence of a lack of patience.

A second serious issue with patience is that you can’t really possess it. It is not a permanent character trait or virtue. You don’t have patience, you practice it in given circumstances for a given purpose. One moment of weakness, a moment of impatience, can jeopardise an entire project or venture. One can also be very patient in reaching one goal and very impatient in reaching another goal.  

The good news about patience is that it can bring us to things of real value. To reach a such a ‘higher’ goal, we will always need dedicated time and we will need to overcome anxieties. To overcome the time, we need patience; to overcome the anxieties, we need courage. Patience and courage go well together in any achievement we aim for. And in essence, our admiration for people is essentially based on virtues like patience and courage, not on achievements. The actual achievements will be surpassed by newcomers, but the virtues will remain. 

I refer to my earlier blogs: "Ode to Industry","Virtues and Virtutes" and "You are your time"

Ode to Generosity

In this new year 2017, you may be looking for inspiration for a New Year's resolution.

In this blog, I would like to recommend Generosity. You may suspect me promoting something that is in my own interest. This may very well be the case, but in return for your 2017 generosity, I am making the same resolution. I will therefore write this resolution in the "we (us)" person.

1. Let us be generous with money. Let us be generous with gifts and presents. 
2. For the entrepreneurs, let us be generous with investments.
3. Let us be generous with time and attention. Let us take time to listen.
4. Let us be generous with our work and our devotion to work.
5. Let us be generous with help and assistance. Let us find friends to help.
6. Let us be generous with hospitality. Let us send out lots of invitations.
7. Let us be generous with our knowledge and our wisdom. Let us be generous with questions.
8. Let us be generous with ourselves, our internal state-of-minds. Let us be open about ourselves and let us shut up about others.
9. Let us be generous with compliments, greetings, blessings and thank-you's.
10. Let us be generous with social media likes and comments.

Have faith in the human spirit.

Have faith in your own spirit. 

Have faith in the spirit of your fellow human being.

And truly connect.

I refer to my earlier blog: "Generosity, the ultimate cure for a sick economy".