Age of Change

Change is neither good nor bad in itself.  Sometimes change is another word for waste.  These days it is often thoughtless, though it has its own momentum.

Humans are built for change.  Dealing with change--sizing up and seizing opportunities, foreseeing and responding to danger--is what our species does best. When the environment changes, we adapt.  It's why we're still around.

This ability is so much a part of our natures that we seek change.  As a species we spread out all over the world, sometimes compelled by circumstances but apparently very often because we like to wander.  We change our environment voluntarily. We are intensely curious, both mentally and emotionally.  We imagine a better place, a better future.

That and a superficial evaluation of technological change has tended to privilege change itself.  You can't fight "progress."  That may be true to some extent, but it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Change that is danger to some is opportunity to others, and it is in their interest to augment the natural excitement that change inspires. Capitalism needs and fears change.  Large-scale change for the past couple of centuries has largely occurred when corporations could engineer it for profit.

As you get older, you have more experience with the vagaries of change.  So older people are perhaps more skeptical of change that sweeps society with the frenzy of fashion, the pressure of conformity and the opportunities to make a move, make money, make a name, move up in the world.  Maybe it takes older people to see the potential pitfalls, the costs of waste, the possible and probable consequences. And to have the security to say, no thanks.

On a larger scale these are attributes that are among those that make elders pretty good futurists.  It may seem ironic but evaluating change, keeping eyes open to consequences, is oriented towards the future.

This is not an argument for stasis.  Change involves risk, but benefits as well as drawbacks are possible, and no one can foresee everything.  Even in daily life, novelty perks us up, change can refresh, and it gives us another place to stand, another perspective, to appreciate and evaluate our world, both old and new.

Change is energizing, and can be intoxicating.  But it is not always better.  We need skeptics as well as risk-takers.  Slow absorbers and synthesizers as well as enthusiasts and early adopters.  People willing to resist the stampede.

Vision does not always mean a vision of changes to come.  Vision is also about evaluating consequences and interactions.  We need look no further than the spreading dead zones and huge floating islands of plastic garbage in our oceans, or to the climate we have irrevocably deformed, to realize this.