Coping with change like never before

SOCIAL STUDIES - Published Monday October 6th, 2008

When you read this I will already be 40.

Intellectually I know that every year is a different one, and that aging just happens to every single thing on the planet. Somehow decades hit me harder though.

I remember being completely stunned when I turned 30. My life pretty much ended. Not literally, but figuratively. I left behind the career I believed I was training for, I left behind the way of life I was living, and in the process discovered that the next decade was going to be better and better in every way.

I am sure this will be true for the coming decade as well, that it will be the best 10 years of my life so far; but as I get older and more set in my ways I am finding it increasingly difficult to navigate the change in the world.

I have heard it said that this past decade has been the fastest changing in the recorded history of humanity. Think about it; from the Second World War until the 1960s there was a relative period of stability in terms of invention and social structure. Two parent, multiple kid homes, with a male breadwinner and a female homemaker. Everyone had a radio, then a television, a phone, a car and most likely a travel trailer.

Sure, things happened. The Cold War comes quickly to mind. But the things that happened did not change the lay of the land all that much.

Then the hippies got involved. Vietnam and the Love Children changed everything and we have been on a roller coaster ever since.

I am commonly slotted as a Generation X individual; in other words, I am different from my Baby Boomer parents. Since the 60s however, you can't even count on your two children seeing the world the same way. We have three generations in the last 25 years, Y, Net and Millennium being the terms some people use.

What it means is that anyone born a few years from now will see the world completely differently, because the world is changing that fast.

I had to learn the battle of Hastings took place in 1066 in England. I had to memorize that incredibly useful bit of information for some reason, along with countless other facts. My youngest brother belongs to a different generation, he just looks up facts on a computer. He is trained to see patterns, not facts.

So much has changed though, hasn't it?

My personal favourite is digital television; "high def" at that. I remember watching the Wonderful World of Disney in black and white. Now I can put in my DVD and watch computer generated monsters eat digitally enhanced heroes for breakfast.

The smoke detector was invented in 1969, digital music in 1970. Acronyms that did not pre-exist me include the MRI, GPS and even digital DNA fingerprinting.

Think about what we have done in terms of health, creating laser and microsurgery, pacemakers that control so many different heart functions, artificial everything and even Prozac and Viagra.

We have learned all about wind and sun and wave power even if we are just scratching the surface.

We have put a man on the moon, built a house in space, and searched for life on Mars.

I want you to consider it took humanity about 2,000 years from planting a seed to creating a plough, and that the leap from copper to bronze took generations. In the last decade in terms of communications alone we have gone from standard telephones, to portable, to wireless, the Internet, to text messaging, to VoIP.

I remember the first time I went to Walt Disney World as a kid and when you got off the Space Mountain ride you rode a moving sidewalk past displays about the "future". What was on display was essentially the video disk. Some day in the future they would create a shining metal disk that would hold data and could be used to watch movies.

It was all true within a decade.

The last time I was down there they were talking about beaming objects from place to place just like a Star Trek transporter. Does that mean that this technology is less than a decade away? Perhaps it does.

All this reminiscing has a point though, and the point is psychological.

To say that 40 is in fact any different than 39 is strange. The decade is just an artificial marker. Not only that, but each stage of my life has brought both pain and joy in equal amounts. There are some things I have to let go of as I age; for example, I am not going to be an Olympic athlete, or in fact a professional athlete of any kind. My reflexes are shot. On the other hand, I took up running just last year and I hope to run a marathon while I am 40.

How we see ourselves and our surroundings makes a difference.

Psychologists believe that our attitude changes our action. We've all seen immature 30 year olds and vibrant 80 year olds so I think we can relate to this concept. I want to be the type of 40 year old that is wholeheartedly engaged in the process of living life as a 40 year old. Adapting to each year of life is actually quite an adventure.

Change is not only constant and inevitable, but it's now coming at us faster than at any point in human history. Who knows what the world will look like in 2018 when, God willing, I celebrate my 50th birthday. One thing is for sure, the changes we'll see in the next decade will dwarf those we've seen in the previous decades, and probably in ways we can't even begin to imagine.