Generational Change
An end-of-the-year meditation with old photos
Happy New Year! In my final post of 2023, I look back at how dramatically the world has changed since my parents and my grandparents were born.
As the year comes to a close, I’ve been going through old photographs and family mementos. The passage of time and the advancement of technology is evident in the changing media of the images across the years. In spite of those recent events—the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the October 7 attacks on Israel—that dramatically affected our lives, our day-to-day experience of life changes very little from year to year. But when I look at these old photos the world of my childhood seems almost unrecognizably remote and strange.
We tend to overestimate how much things will change over a year or two, but underestimate how much they’ll change over a decade or a generation. This is a version of an idea attributed to the futurist Roy Amara—sometimes called “Amara’s Law”—about forecasting technological change, but it’s true of change more generally. In any given year, our lives change in relatively small ways that we mostly anticipate. Because we underestimate how long it takes to build and to implement change—and because we get caught up in the hype around new things—these changes happen more slowly than we expect. But over time gradual changes in the way we live accumulate and compound until taken together they’re transformative.
When I was born, in 1970, the average global temperature was 1°C cooler than it is today. There were about 3.7 billion people on Earth, less than half as many as there are now. Life expectancy in the US was about 71 years. Smallpox had not been eradicated; I was part of the last generation that was vaccinated against the disease. The per capita GDP of the US—now close to $70,000—was just $26,000 in today’s dollars, so Americans were much poorer then than they are now. ARPANET, the early ancestor of the internet, was switched on just a year before I was born. Intel had not yet begun to sell microprocessors commercially. Seven of the 10 largest companies in the world today hadn’t been founded. The European Union didn’t exist, but the Soviet Union did. South Africa was racially segregated under the Apartheid system. Richard Nixon was president of the US. In spite of the war in Vietnam—where the US had several hundred thousand troops deployed—Nixon was so popular that he would win the 1972 election with more than 60% of the popular vote.
