Future Shock
This excerpt from “Future Shock” by Alvin Toffler provides us with a current and fascinating insight into where we now find ourselves in the 21st Century. The Information Age has created more ‘overload’ than we could have imagined. I speak with people every day who are stressed and complain they have no time and feel so tired. As Toffler says, “The symptoms of Future Shock are with us now.”
Without hyping doom and gloom let us evaluate the need to pace ourselves according to our energy levels and take adequate time to think creatively about business and perhaps more importantly……life itself!
Let me know your thoughts on the brief quote. Thank you in advance.
In 1970, Alvin Toffler in Future Shock described a trend towards accelerating rates of change.[45] He illustrated how social and technological norms had shorter lifespans with each generation, and he questioned society’s ability to cope with the resulting turmoil and anxiety. In past generations periods of change were always punctuated with times of stability. This allowed society to assimilate the change and deal with it before the next change arrived. But these periods of stability are getting shorter and by the late 20th century had all but disappeared. In 1980 in The Third Wave, Toffler characterized this shift to relentless change as the defining feature of the third phase of civilization (the first two phases being the agricultural and industrial waves).[46] He claimed that the dawn of this new phase will cause great anxiety for those that grew up in the previous phases, and will cause much conflict and opportunity in the business world. Hundreds of authors, particularly since the early 1990s, have attempted to explain what this means for business strategy.
