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:
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Disposable culture: He predicted throwaway products, and now we have single-use plastics, fast fashion, and gadgets that feel obsolete within a year.
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Tech burnout: Toffler said technology would become outdated faster and faster.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.
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Rent instead of own: Services like Airbnb and Uber fit his prediction that we’d move away from owning things and toward renting everything.
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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.
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Transient relationships: He warned about shallow, fleeting social connections — something social media, dating apps, and global mobility have absolutely amplified.
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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?
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.
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…