Humanity and the accelerating velocity of 21st Century change

Having had enough frustration with the 2020s already, recently I switched to writing spoof news and am finding it much more enjoyable, even therapeutic. Still every now and then a serious thought gets triggered that might be worth elaborating upon. Whether this one is worthy or not I can’t say. I’ll leave that judgement to you.

Personally, I always find it strange how easy it is to gloss over some details in plain sight when I’m just not tuned in. It’s reassuring to know that it’s fairly common. Most of us have experienced the Baader-Meinhoff phenomenon. That’s when you’re introduced to something new, such as a car model and next thing you know you’re seeing that model everywhere. It’s no coincidence. It actually demonstrates how much we all tend to miss in our day-to-day experience. It’s called ‘cognitive bias’.

So recently I realized that cognitive bias also applies to the changes happening around and within us as well. 2020s change is constant and rapid. Technology is integral to our lives more than ever before and is constantly expanding, upgrading and broadening its influence on us. Keeping up requires some cognitive dexterity that, as an aging baby boomer, I appreciate, since continual learning keeps the mind in order.

But what’s most profound is how progress has impacted what we think. Namely, our most fundamental, foundational assumptions about what humanity is and what we’re doing here on Earth is shifting with the advance of technology and our realizing what is possible.

I first learned to systemically observing societal change with a reading assignment in college; Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock helped me contextualize my experiences at the time. Back then (1980s) Future Shock was especially relevant to urban life and the fast-pace, hustle-bustle of ever-increasing congestion and the perpetual road construction we’d mistake as temporary.

Forty years later the phenomenon of accelerating change impacts everyone everywhere. No matter where you live, urban or rural setting, we’ve all become very dependent on the technology and it’s woven through every facet of our daily experience.

To use Toffler’s description: “the accelerated rate of technological and social change leaves people disconnected and suffering from shattering stress and disorientation — future shocked.”

I retired from my corporate job a couple of years ago, and I know that a return to that world would mean having to essentially start over as a beginner given the changes over that time.

Yet there’s no doubt, it’s an amazing time in human history to be alive. Consider that people born only 150 years ago — for myself that’s my great grandparents — the world was relatively static. So for a young adult learning a profession, the tools and methods they used were pretty much the same as those used by their grandparents and great-grandparents. This held true across the board; farmer, transporter, lawyer or doctor, etc.

By 1900 change started picking up speed. But even then, people across generations still experienced life as a continuum. For example, I’d say parents well into the 1980s could relate to their kids experiences as they grew up. When I was a student, my parents had a general sense of my experience. There were certainly technological advances and changes in the educational approach, but we were still in the same general ballpark.

But we’re now at a point where we can no longer mark change by generations, instead the gap widens discernably every year. Parents today really can’t relate to their kids’ experience based on their own. The ramifications of this are yet to be determined, though it seems much more important for parents to be present and actively involved in a child’s education, it’s a lot of work but it’s their only hope of being able relate to and support their kids.

I had difficulty supporting with my own kids, who are millenials. What they were dealing with in school during the 00s was far different than what I recalled in my own experiences; no matter if it was subject matter, school policy or protocol. We’d go back and forth talking about an issue and not really understanding each other. Very frustrating.

Technology has transformed our environment so completely that our day-to-day experiences, such as how we work, play, shop, etc. would be foreign to people in the 1960s and 70s. There are structural/physical changes around us everywhere. Only people like Toffler or Ray Kurzweil anticipated these things. But I wonder if they anticipated a fundamental change in how we think about our world and our particular place in it?

For example, consider our ideas about extraterrestrial life. There have been major changes in our thinking since the 1970s and 80s, when we also felt a sense of being distinctly separate from prospective ET life. We saw ETs, if they existed, as strange and exotic with no relation whatsoever to us.

Back then, looking into space we saw only a dark, endless vacuum. We now have telescopes powerful enough to see planets around nearby (<100 light years) stars and have realized there are many, many planets out there that can support carbon-based life, which is what we are. So, it’s no longer a question of IF, it’s WHEN. And in just a few days the US Government will be coming out of the closet on UFOs/ETs. Just for the record, if what they “disclose” is truth, it will be the first time in a long time our government has been honest with us. But the key point is already out, we’re not alone.

Over my lifetime, we’ve gradually awakened to the possibility that life on Earth may have been seeded — helped along by a more advanced life form(s). It’s typically the great minds that introduce these ideas and push us along. In this instance, Stanly Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey was based on Arthur Clarke’s 1951 novel titled “The Sentinel”. The film premiered in 1968 and although there was lots of initial confusion and misunderstanding of the plot, the film eventually helped shift our awareness to seeing humanity as citizens of the universe. I have to believe that our genes are partly responsible for that. What scientists now call “junk DNA” is not actually junk at all, just something that is beyond our current understanding. I can state that with confidence knowing nature just doesn’t make mistakes.

The premise of the 2001 story is that once upon a time, advanced ETs noticed life on Earth, landed here and tinkered with monkey DNA, mixing it with their own to create humankind. It explains why we have a missing link. This idea could not go mainstream until the major breakthrough in DNA mapping during the 1990s. It’s one of many instances of a Science breakthrough and Science Fiction becoming reality. This one is particularly fascinating to me, because once we discovered the means of creating and tinkering with life, our collective imagination found entirely new realms of what may have happened ‘In the beginning’.

In fact, we’re always evolving, physically, mentally and spiritually. So a growing number of us see humanity, not as children of Earth, but rather children of the cosmos. That’s what we are. Such megatrends require Big Picture thinking. That means thinking about the human race as one giant organism. Because that’s really what we are.

The separateness or uniqueness of our self-expression is what makes life interesting, but it’s also the source of all our pain and suffering (as taught by the Buddha), and is what prompts much of the destructive behavior we often exhibit, sometimes toward ourselves, more often to one another.

By nature’s design, most of us are wired to perpetuate the human species, as a general rule of thumb. This same rule holds true for all living things, animal and vegetable. Fruit in this regard, is merely a clever way to wrap seeds, that will be spit out into the dirt and possible rebirth.

In human life, the drive to carry on is in the attraction to the opposite sex. The characteristics we look for in each other such as good health, symmetrical features, body type, are typically the criteria you’d use to produce the strongest, healthiest offspring with the best chance to survive and thrive.

So, we’re just one more life form in the universe after all. We’ve made it this far because of nature’s amazingly intelligent design. What I’m wondering now is whether other living beings ETs will be subject to the same system of natural selection. We’ve got to assume that’s a minimum capability they have working for them if they’ve made it to where they are. It’s possible they’ve bypassed such a trial & error method completely.

The possibilities are limitless. Just stay tuned and alive.