2w ago

Are we all suffering from "future shock" in 2025?

Back in 1970, Alvin Toffler wrote Future Shock, where he introduced the idea that too much rapid change could leave people feeling overwhelmed, stressed, and disconnected. He called it "future shock" — and honestly, reading it today feels almost eerie with how accurate he was.

Toffler believed we were moving from an industrial society to a "super-industrial" one, where everything would change faster than people could handle. The book was a huge hit at the time, selling over six million copies, but what's crazy is how much of what he talked about feels even more true in 2025. Some examples:

Disposable culture: He predicted throwaway products, and now we have single-use plastics, fast fashion, and gadgets that feel obsolete within a year.
Tech burnout: Toffler said technology would become outdated faster and faster. Today, if you don’t upgrade your phone or update your software, you feel left behind.
Rent instead of own: Services like Airbnb and Uber fit his prediction that we’d move away from owning things and toward renting everything.
Job instability: He nailed the rise of the gig economy, freelancing, and how fast-changing industries make it hard to stay trained up and secure.
Transient relationships: He warned about shallow, fleeting social connections — something social media, dating apps, and global mobility have absolutely amplified.
Information overload: This term literally came from Future Shock, and if you've ever felt exhausted just from scrolling through your feeds or reading the news, you know exactly what he meant.

Toffler also talked about the "death of permanence" — not just products, but relationships, jobs, even identities becoming temporary and interchangeable. He warned it would cause "shattering stress and disorientation." Looking around at the rising rates of anxiety, depression, and burnout today, it’s hard not to see what he meant.

I think about this book a lot when I read about some of the sick things happening today. Is this a warped perspective?

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I’m absolutely shocked at how racist the future got.
- Was the past not racist?
  
  i'm in my early 40s. back when i was a kid - even in the southern US - there was a clear message that racism was on its way out. tons of sitcoms even did special episodes about it! (/s) And because media was so controlled back then (ie you couldn't just post something to the internet), a lot of people actually blelieved it. i know that i did as a kid who didn't know any better.
  
  Nobody's suggesting it wasn't. But a lot of us have lived our whole lives with the idea that racism was generally frowned upon by most and that it was naturally dying out. I don't think many of us could have predicted how readily it would come roaring back, along with god damn nazis, FFS.
  
  Yes it absolutely was. And while we seemed for a while to have been on a trajectory where it was decreasing steadily, that sure changed quickly.
- Eh, I'm not surprised. I'm more surprised at how comfortable with people being racist in public.
  
  Same thing I think when I see Magats wearing that red cap.
- Well counterpoint look at LGBTQ rights in the 70s.
  
  Pretty bad, but things started improving in the 80s, through to the 00s, when it started getting worse, and now it's all shit again and getting worse. And when it's over, we have to dig ourselves out of the shitty bigot hole again.
- Compared to 1970? Trump is making it worse but it's not that bad yet.
  Edit for the downvoters.
  You kids have no idea how racist America was in the 1970's.
  1974, Boston:
  https://segregationinamerica.eji.org/report/how-segregation-survived.html
  
  Nope. The 1970s were better than the 60s, and worse than the 80s. And the 90s were better still. The early 2000s were even better.... but here we are certainly backtracking from where things had been going.

I always feel like these posts are written by ChatGPT when I see multiple — in the text.
- I'll never forgive OpenAI for making the unordered list a reason to complain about content.
  
  I think the comment you are replying to is not about the unordered list — but your use of em dash.
  See the above sentence for an example
- Does ChatGPT incorrectly put spaces around the em dash, too? There should be no spaces around an em dash—that’s a clue that implies a human writer.
  And, em dashes and en dashes are great—they should be used more often.
- I used a tool online to validate it.
  There is no reliable tool to detect AI content. A few months ago someone tried to do a "gotcha" on some of my content, citing AI generation by use of some "AI detector". However, I ran some of their posts on LinkedIn through the same tool and it came up as 80% likely to be AI generated.
  He vehemently denied using any AI at all — and was pretty annoyed to have the tool turned back against him.

It's not really so much the rapidness of the changes, but what is rapidly changing that worries me.
If we were rapidly moving towards progress, I'd be fine. But we are rapidly going fucking backwards here in the states.

Nah bro, we're suffering from Late Stage Capitalism and Christo-facism.
This isn't a bug this is a feature of the US. It's always been intended to be this way. The mid 20th century was the outlier.

I think some people are, but not everyone. But the people most prone to that future shock are the older, wealthier generations, and they're using their wealth and positions of power to take out their confusion and fear on everyone else that still sees that the world has room for improvement.
- It makes me upset that we're probably going to find a cure for aging before we find a way to get the old generations to adapt to change.

If you leave your phone at home for one day, take a walk, get some coffee, meet a friend - but don't use your phone, schedule in advance and tell them you'll be phone-less, etc. You'll find yourself feeling way less overwhelmed by a lot of these things. Phones keep us constantly aware of the changes around us. They make it seem like the world is whirring around much faster than it is. Basically, I guess, I'm suggesting "touch grass". But I do think phones, in particular, are the worst for making us crash out like this.
- The everything is already awful enough without us having to carry around a device that connects us to all the awful everywhere we go.
- This made me think when was the last time I left my home without a phone and I would have to go all the way back before Nokias got popular in my country, shit these days I don't even go to the bathroom without my phone. I hate the feeling of constantly being available to others, I hate pings and phone calls. I think I'll buy a dedicated media player for music and audio books, and just carry a dumb phone with me that can only do calls and messages the next time I want to go out for a stroll.
  
  When I go running the phone stays gone. It forces you to be present where you are. Very freeing.

Future Shock is pretty spot on with it's predictions. Reading it convinced me to try and take things slower, and to spend less time on the phone, on the internet, which helped. Then covid came along, and pushed me right back into information overload...

Here's the Futureshock documentary I was show in high-school around 1982 for anyone interested https://youtu.be/fkUwXenBokU

Interesting points, maybe a book I'll have to give a read to. I've long thought that information overload on its own leads to a kind of subjective compression and that we're seeing the consequences of this, plus late stage capitalism.
Basically, if we only know about 100 people and 10 events and 20 things, we have much more capacity to form nuanced opinions, like a vector with lots of values. We don't just have an opinion about the person, our opinion toward them is the sum of opinions about what we know about them and how those relate to us.
Without enough information, you think in very concrete ways. You don't build up much nuance, and you have clear, at least self-evident logic for your opinions that you can point at.
Hit a sweet spot, and you can form nuanced opinions based on varied experiences.
Hit too much, and now you have to compress the nuances to make room for more coarse comparisons. Now you aren't looking at the many nuances and merits, you're abstracting things. Necessary simulacrum.
I've wondered if this is where we've seen so much social regression, or at least being public about it. There are so many things to care about, to know, to attend to, that the only way to approach it is to apply a compression, and everyone's worldview is their compression algorithm. What features does a person classify on?
I feel like we just aren't equipped to handle the global information age yet, and we need specific ways of being to handle it. It really is a brand new thing for our species.
Do we need to see enough of the world to learn the nuances, then transition to tighter community focus? Do we need strong family ties early with lower outside influence, then melting pot? Are there times in our development when social bubbling is more ideal or more harmful than otherwise? I'm really curious.
Anecdotally, I feel like I benefitted a lot from tight-knit, largely anonymous online communities growing up. Learning from groups of people from all over the world of different ages and beliefs, engaging in shared hobbies and learning about different ways of life, but eventually the neurons aren't as flexible for breadth and depth becomes the drive.
- I feel like we just aren’t equipped to handle the global information age yet, and we need specific ways of being to handle it. It really is a brand new thing for our species.
  The root of so many of our problems is we have the firmware from a prehistoric primate up in our head but we have to live in an environment that on the geological scale is more or less brand new. With the rate of change STILL increasing, natural evolution will never enable us to "catch up". It's only going to get worse from here on in, at least until the Singularity, when we can just hope that the AI overlords let us live our our days in a little human "reservation" while it keeps on rolling...

Fascism Shock, too.

Totally.
Thinks are obsolete before you even know they exist, or so it feels. But maybe it's just the information highway making us taking in so much information 24/7. I mean where are the solar powered self driving cars?
- "The future is already here—it's just not very evenly distributed"
  
  Gibson?

Yeah. Sometimes I wonder if I'm ready to die in my 30s. Any genuine humane reasoning for living is quickly denied.
- Carousel!

Idk if anything technological change has massively stagnated because exploitation of workers is far cheaper than reducing costs through innovation.
Disposable culture: He predicted throwaway products, and now we have single-use plastics, fast fashion, and gadgets that feel obsolete within a year.
Tech burnout: Toffler said technology would become outdated faster and faster. Today, if you don’t upgrade your phone or update your software, you feel left behind.
Compare the leap between iPhone 3GS to iPhone 4 and iPhone X to whatever the newest one is.
My phone is a Pixel 4a and the only noticeable difference between it and the latest pixel is that this one has a headphone jack and the others don't and they look like shit and have a worse selfie cam lol.
There used to be a time where upgrading your GPU every year would get you better bang for your buck long-term because improvements were so rapid. Now your 1070Ti can still run most games fairly well and with something like a 3090 you can last another 5 years easily, while the PS5 is barely any different to the PS4.
Information overload: This term literally came from Future Shock, and if you've ever felt exhausted just from scrolling through your feeds or reading the news, you know exactly what he meant.
I don't get this one at all. I don't feel exhausted whatsoever, information is actually stimulating. Of course if you only scroll the news you'll feel depressed because we live in a dystopia, but that's not information overload, it's just sad. On the other hand if simply reading anything makes you overwhelmed that just seems like a lack of reading stamina so you can just not do that, or develop that stamina.
Transient relationships: He warned about shallow, fleeting social connections — something social media, dating apps, and global mobility have absolutely amplified.
I don't think this is a bad thing.
Rent instead of own: Services like Airbnb and Uber fit his prediction that we’d move away from owning things and toward renting everything.
Job instability: He nailed the rise of the gig economy, freelancing, and how fast-changing industries make it hard to stay trained up and secure.
This is all basic capitalism and it's consequences.
EDIT: not sure what I said that was so controversial as to being deserving of downvotes.
- EDIT: not sure what I said that was so controversial as to being deserving of downvotes.
  I try to never just slam that button instead of replying, because then we all lose out on learning a bit more. When I read your comment, especially the bit:
  Of course if you only scroll the news you’ll feel depressed because we live in a dystopia, but that’s not information overload, it’s just sad. On the other hand if simply reading anything makes you overwhelmed that just seems like a lack of reading stamina so you can just not do that, or develop that stamina.
  That feels a lot like telling someone depressed: "Hey idiot, ever thought of just not being sad?" I think the really tragic point is there are some people extremely addicted to doom-scrolling, despite feeling awfully sad about it. Classical addiction.
  And then, some other gems, like:
  Transient relationships: He warned about shallow, fleeting social connections — something social media, dating apps, and global mobility have absolutely amplified. I don’t think this is a bad thing.
  This feels profoundly against human nature. We seem predisposed, almost since birth, to try to form deep, lasting relationships with other people. You might feel this way but I'm not sure it's a typical state.
  Job instability: He nailed the rise of the gig economy, freelancing, and how fast-changing industries make it hard to stay trained up and secure.
  This is all basic capitalism and it’s consequences.
  But it's not though... capitalism is hundreds of years old, yet the gig economy is not. If it's just "basic capitalism" wouldn't we have expected to see "ye Olde Ubere" workers in 1560?

He didn't really "predict" any of it though just as Gordon Moore didn't "predict" that computers are going to get faster.
Extrapolation from existing data might be a better term. What you cite already existed in 1970, if in lesser amounts than today.
- He didn’t really “predict” any of it though just as Gordon Moore didn’t “predict” that computers are going to get faster.
  You're right: Gordon Moore did not "predict" that computers would "get faster". He stated that the numbers of transistors on a chip would continue to double every two years. It's only semi-recently that this has started to peter out.
  I guess you're not happy with usage of the word "predict"? There were plenty of people who weren't Alvin Toffler that used the same data in the 1970s and drew the opposite conclusions. Do you disagree with what Alvin says or are you just trivializing what he wrote because it seems obvious to you?

Very cool idea!
Tho I think people from 70s would very much still choose 2025 living over 70s. People really underestimate how much better we have now.
Especially if you take a look at the whole world outside of US bubble. You think people in Asia and Africa yearn for 70s? You think people in Easrten Europe has any fondness of Soviet occupation? Future shock is shockingly great in their eyes.
I think the more apt issue here is simply the fact that US empire is falling as this shock does not replicate everywhere so clearly it's not universal. Most places benefited greatly from information flow and imo it's a very clear net gain.
- Future Shock isn’t about the 70s or any decade being “better.” It’s about the effects of rapidly changing technology not that technology shouldn’t change.
  
  Yeah but OP clearly implies that rapidly changing world is a bad thing when it doesn't seem to be in most measurable metrics.
- Tho I think people from 70s would very much still choose 2025 living over 70s. People really underestimate how much better we have now.
  Couldn't I yearn for a time that has neither the bad points of 1970 and none of the bad points from 2025? Not everything was worse in the 1970s, and not everything was better, either.
  
  Sure the same way I yearn for Middle Earth then.
  If you take at least half of a reasonable utilitarian position then 70s don't stand a chance no matter how you look at it. Everything is literally better now except nostalgic bullshit like "housing was cheaper if I was white american" and "I couldn't doomscroll" sort of nonsense. Absolute drivel.

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