> "I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."

There's truth to this quote, but a lot missing. It sort of implies a world view where new technologies, like fashions, continuously spring up at a somewhat regular pace, so that each generation has its own technological reference point distinct from their children or parents. Think about it, that's probably approximately how you view the world, don't you? It's how it's been for generations.

But actually, it's only been that way for a handful of generations. For about 300 years or so. Prior to the industrial revolution, the pace of technological innovation was so slow most people would not notice it within their lifetime.

They could safely accept their parents advice on how to navigate the world, confident it would still apply in their time as it had in theirs. They could safely pass their own wisdom on to their children, secure in the same certainty. Probably people saw time as more cyclical, thinking of how winter leads to summer and back to winter, and how the parent begets the child who then themselves becomes a parent.

All that has been changed completely, utterly, and dramatically. We are now cut off from our prior generations because we have to recreate, in each generation, from scratch, the knowhow on how to cope with the environment we are born in.

Many technological innovations have been very beneficial for many, but there is a cost to a fast pace of change.