Article: The Future as a Way of Life

Had I read this article without knowing that it was written in 1965, I would have bet it was written by a futurist blogger on Substack as early as yesterday.

While pointing at the rate of change underway across society, culture, and technology, Alvin Toffler frames a form of malaise taking over, "Future Shock" which he describes as a "dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future." It's a state wherein societies are unable to adapt and anchor their sense of identity and belonging to the change around them. Unlike culture shock, from which a traveler rest in the comfort of return to their usual state, future shock offers no such respite.

Because our sense of identity depends on having a place in the structure of society, constant and accelerating change, Toffler argues, forces redefinitions that imposes "unendurable stress on a great many people."

One of Toffler's sharpest claims that speaks to a generation of professionals and recent graduates entering the job market today is the ever shrinking lifespan of an occupation, and with it the loss of what Toffler calls man's "anchor and organizing principle."

While we may not know the limits of our capacity to adapt, Toffler argues that if we are to "cope with the equivalent of millenniums of change within the compressed span of a single lifetime", we must throw away our conception of time as relatively static and train ourselves to speculate about the future with reasonable sense of accuracy.

Here are some thought-provoking quotes from the article:

In the past it was possible to know in advance what occupation would exist when a boy became a man. Today the life span of occupation has also been compressed. The computer programmer, who was first heard of in the 1950's, will be as extinct as the blacksmith within a matter of years, perhaps by 1970. Individuals now train for a profession and look forward to remaining in that profession for the entire period of their working life. Yet within a generation the notion of serving in a single occupation for one's entire life may seem quaintly antique. Individuals may need to be trained to serve successively in three, four, or half a dozen different professions in the course of a career. The job will no longer serve as man's anchor and organizing principle.

"We all need," says psychiatrist John R. Rees, Honorary President of the World Federation of Mental Health, "a sense of our own identity, that we have a certain place in the structure of our society, and that we fit into that. We have constantly to change our identity when we move into a different sort of world, and we often get considerable confusion of identity, something that is disturbing to many people. They cannot take it..."

If the degree of change and the speed of that change is even remotely close to what I have suggested, it must be obvious that the shift to Professor Boulding's "postcivilization" may place unendurable stress on a great many people. For the current upbringing of most people, and the subtly inculcated sense of time that comes with it, are both inimical to adaptability.

...the most educated people today operate on the assumption that society is relatively static. At best they attempt to plan by making simple straight-line projections of present-day trends. The result is unreadiness to meet the future when it arrives. In short, future shock.

If the contemporary individual is going to have to cope with the equivalent of millenniums of change within the compressed span of a single lifetime, he must carry within his skull a reasonably accurate (even if gross) image of the future.