The thing about future shock is that it's destabilizing.
Every person faces the question: "how should I live?" And the faster things change, the harder the question is to answer.
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Vonnegut had a nice time invariant way of thinking about a partial way of dealing with this:
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I guess I'm back to a point I made a few days ago: so much of the modern world comes out of ideas from the Axial Age. And yet so much _foundational_ knowledge has changed radically. What's the right order? Or is that the wrong question?
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Not just in physics. And the clouds are moving faster:
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Just thinking of all the revolutions in dating in the last ~60 years:
+ The pill
+ "Free love"
+ HIV/AIDS & STIs
+ Dating apps (and those have changed massively, too)
+ Massively changed norms around sexuality, consent, rights, poly, marriage, etc etc etc
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That's... a lot for a society to absorb. And there are people who've navigated _all_ those things
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Actually, a fun idea for a feature article - find some people who remember dating _before_ the contraceptive pill (~1960), but who are on dating apps now, or have been at some point in the past. I wonder if there are any? They'd be ~80+...
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I guess trad or reactionary approaches are a pretty natural response, but they butt up against reality.
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Seems likely there'd be some around. Dating apps go back a long time, & were quite mainstream by the late oughties - so someone might have started dating before the pill, & used a dating app in their late 60s(!!!)
It'd be wild to hear their impressions
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Actually, a fun idea for a feature article - find some people who remember dating _before_ the contraceptive pill (~1960), but who are on dating apps now, or have been at some point in the past. I wonder if there are any? They'd be ~80+...
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Realizing this is all related to Tad Homer-Dixon's notion of "the ingenuity gap", the gap between the problems a society has, & the problems it knows how to solve
Larger ingenuity gaps mean a lot of big problems poorly addressed
Collective future shock widens the ingenuity gap
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Replying to
Heh, I’ve been calling it the invention gap with consulting clients in talking about long-range planning. The part of the roadmap that requires you to invent shit to hit targets. It’s the region beyond stretch goals.

