Future Shock

by Alvin Toffler

Nobody knows. It may well be that the limits stretch so far beyond present needs, that such gloomy speculations are unjustified. Yet one salient fact commands attention: by speeding up change in the outer world, we compel the individual to relearn his environment at every moment. This, in itself, places a new demand on the nervous system. The people of the past, adapting to comparatively stable environments, maintained longer-lasting ties with their own inner conceptions of "the-way-things-are." We, moving into high-transience society, are forced to truncate these relationships. Just as we must make and break our relationships with things, places, people and organizations at an ever more rapid pace, so, too, must we turn over our conceptions of reality, our mental images of the world at shorter and shorter intervals. Transience, then, the forcible abbreviation of man's relationships, is not merely a condition of the external world. It has its shadow within us as well. New discoveries, new technologies, new social arrangements in the external world erupt into our lives in the form of increased turnover rates—shorter and shorter relational durations. They force a faster and faster pace of daily life. They demand a new level of adaptability. And they set the stage for that potentially devastating social illness—future shock.

Change in the outer world changing our inner world Transcience