On Change and Rate of Change

Things are getting better, faster, than ever before.

Dear Friends,

When I was born in Phoenix, Arizona on an August day in 1979, there were approximately 4,336,000,000 other people on the planet. 44 years later there are over 8,045,311,447 other people sharing our one planet. Worldometer has a page where you can find the exact world population. Our population hasn’t quite doubled by the point of my actuarial middle age (or just a bit past it), but it will likely double before I die.

Generation X, as the people who divide our society into groups based on the years we were born like to call those who were born between 1965 and 1980, is likely to pass the Baby Boomers (1946-1964) as a percentage of Americans by the 2028 Presidential election.

My generation remembers the time before communication was ubiquitous and anything published on the Internet was forever, but grew up while all of those rules were changing. We can still feel nostalgia for a time when things didn’t change much from year to year and decade to decade, nostalgia we absorbed from Boomer television reruns and a culture that idolized “the American dream,” but we also absorbed a cynicism from our parents who had had their illusions shattered about those American institutions portrayed in those reruns.

In a way, we were the first generation to grow up with both the myth and the exposed reality and hold both conflicting ideas at once. We grew up in the suburbs built around a stable nuclear family and also let ourselves into the house after school and took care of our siblings because our parents both worked and it wasn’t easy to make it as a one-income household.

Speed is how fast you go. Acceleration is how fast your speed is changing.

Both are increasing now.

Societal change is moving faster than ever, and it’s doing it before the Baby Boomers have left the field to their successors. Social mores are changing so quickly that there are mass market movies my wife and I watched in college that are full of jokes that would get somebody canceled today.

Our son Joel loves raunchy humor, as most 11 year-old boys do. Adam Sandler and Jim Carrey movies are a big hit as he’s getting old enough to watch them, but there are some jokes in “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective” or “Happy Gilmore” that are significantly more offensive to the modern viewer.

That change always happens, where older comedy fall flat because of changing social norms, but it’s happening faster now than ever before.

How much administration and governance is needed in an organization increases as the organization gets bigger. What works for a six person family would be insufficient for managing a 100 person fraternity, which wouldn’t even start to be enough for a 10,000 person corporation, let alone a 360,000,000 person country. What is needed on a planet with eight billion people is going to be different from what is needed on a planet with four billion people.

Our challenge is to accept that everything is going to keep changing at a faster rate every day for the rest of our lives. It’s a lot easier when you realize that most people are just like you, working to do good things for themselves and their community, so most of the changes over time make the world a better place.

Embracing this accelerating rate of change has allowed strategic visionaries to disrupt industries, shock political pundits, and make leaps in innovation that improve the world for everyone. Fighting this accelerating rate of change has fed reactionary movements that have started invasions and cracked down on the individual freedoms of people who were born into groups that can be blamed for the problems in society.

In the end, the world changes and things get better for everyone.

We should do what we can, where we can, to accelerate that rate of change. Make things better for people every chance you get. Amplify the stories of those who are doing likewise. Share good news. Help a neighbor. Call a friend to see what they are working on.

It’s good to share this planet with you.

Yours truly,

Nick

P.S. Substack strongly encourages me to add a subscribe button, so here it is: