It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that change is everywhere these days. Indeed, paradoxically perhaps, change is the only constant in life. As Alvin Toffler stated in Future Shock, “Change is avalanching upon our heads.” One might think he wrote that sentence today, for it certainly feels true, but he actually published it in 1970. Just think of all of the shifts, expansions, and inventions that have occurred since then!

It’s definitely no secret that computers have had a tremendous impact on our society. The creation of microchip technology has had a profound impact on even our most basic appliances and vehicles. The rate at which this kind of technology changes means that by the time you get your computer set up it’s already practically obsolete. When it breaks down, it’s often cheaper to replace it than to invest in fixing it.

With computer and other technological advances has come the information explosion. In the opening paragraph of his book Escape Velocity, cultural critic Mark Dery quotes Marshall McLuhan’s 1967 pronouncement that “electronic media have spun us into a blurred, breathless world of allatonceness’ where information pours up us, instantaneously and continuously,’ sometimes overwhelming us.” Looking back from where we are now, the volume of information has increased so much that the ’70s and ’80s look like a lazy day in the park.

In 1990, in their book Megatrends 2000, futurists John Naisbitt and Patricia Aburdene noted the startling expansion in the sources of media we must content with on a daily basis-television networks, news shows, magazines. Since that statement, the availability of satellite dishes and access to the Internet have increased the options yet again a thousand fold. Unfortunately, Naisbitt’s statement in his 1982 book Megatrends that “we are drowning in information and starved for knowledge is more true now than ever before. If people in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s felt overloaded with information, how can we possibly assimilate all that comes our way each day in the ’90s?

This information overload has everything to do with our feeling overwhelmed by change. It used to be that you were primarily impacted by the changes that happened within a day’s horse ride from your homestead. It might have taken weeks, months, or even years to discover a loved one had died, a revolution had taken place, or the steam engine had been invented. Now everything that happens all over the world also happens in your living room, your car, your office - instantaneously. As transition consultant William Bridges notes in JobShift, “time and distance no longer buffer us against the effects of change.” While in the past we may have been affected by four or five of the changes happening worldwide, now we experience hundreds of them. It’s no wonder everyone’s talking about change these days.

Technology has also changed the way we communicate. We can now “talk” with friends and colleagues around the world via phone, fax, e-mail, beeper, or video conferencing, essentially instantaneously and sometimes for no more than the cost of a local phone call. Although these new forms of communication make it possible for us to telecommute, connect with people when we’re stuck in traffic, and stay in touch with loved ones at the touch of a key, they also blur the boundaries between our professional and personal lives and between night and day. Now, thanks to whizzy technological inventions, our bosses can page us in our bedrooms, call us by cell-phone on the ski slopes, and e-mail us on our laptops at the lake.

Work can literally happen anytime, anywhere, these days and our bosses, our customers, and our gotta-get-it-done selves all try their best to convince us that it should. In fact, in the book, Thriving in Transition, career consultant Marcia Perkins-Reed notes that “we are working more than ever before.” She cited statistics from Juliet Schor’s The Overworked American to demonstrate that in 1989 the average American worked 158 hours (approximately one month) more than in 1969, while the amount of time the average woman worked increased by 287 hours over the same period.

Another area of great change is how and where we work. Not only had the emphasis of the economy shifted from smokestack industries and manufacturing to information and services, the actual number of jobs available through traditional sources is decreasing due to automation, closures, downsizing, consolidations, and reengineering. In fact, white-collar jobs are decreasing even faster than blue-collar jobs. Another significant trend is the ever-increasing reliance on temporary, contract, part-time, freelance, and leased employees.

Toffler spotted this trend in 1970 when he noted there were 500 temporary agencies placing 750,000 short-term employees in jobs ranging from secretaries to engineers. In 1994, Bridges reported that there had been a 60 percent increase in the use of temporary employees since 1980. Quite a significant jump! It’s also interesting to realize that temporary jobs aren’t just for technical or clerical work anymore. Now executive and project managers are also among the rank of the temporarily employed.

On top of all these change in the workplace, and maybe because of them, those of us who are currently employed can expect, according to the United States Department of Labor, to have three to six careers in our lifetime, and the next generation can expect to have between six and ten careers in theirs. And we question why we’re reeling from change and having a hard time dealing with it?

All these technological and work changes have a definite impact on the family in terms of the time we have at home, how we play, how we learn, where we live, and how often we move. The trend toward dual career couples also changes the landscape of the family, bringing child-care issues and concern for family time to the fore. Furthermore, the divorce rate, now over 50 percent in the United States, takes its toll on all of us as family units are dissolved and reformed on a regular basis. We have yet to see the full ramifications all these changes have on the family and on our lives.

There are also major political shifts happening worldwide the fall of the Berlin Wall, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Hong Kong reverting back to Chinese rule) and environmental changes occurring as a result of our consumption-based, technology-hungry culture (clear cutting of the old-growth forests and rainforests, disposal of toxic waste, increasingly resistant strains of bacteria, viruses, and insects to medications and pesticides). Most of us try to ignore these changes because the ramifications are so huge and overwhelming that we can’t predict their impact, let alone find ways we as individuals can address them. But they affect us nonetheless, whether we’re consciously aware of them or not.

Even in 1970, Alvin Toffler was commenting on the impact such changes have on individuals - decision stress, information overload, the assault on our senses, an accelerated pace of life, an awareness of the temporariness of it all. He felt that all these changes would lead to “future shock”-”the shattering stress and disorientation” of being” subjected to too much change in too short a time.” His thought at that time was that “unless man quickly learns to control the rate of change…we are doomed to the massive adaptational breakdown.” From where we sit today, it’s clear that we can’t control the rate or range of the changes we experience. Nor can we just ignore the reality of change. We must find a way to accept that change is a part of our lives and learn to relate to it differently.

This can be very difficult because we lack adequate language to have meaningful discussions about change. I think Jungian analyst Robert Johnson said it best, in The Fisher King and the Handless Maiden, when he claimed, “Where there is no terminology, there is no consciousness. A poverty-stricken vocabulary for any subject is an immediate admission that the subject is inferior or depreciated in that society.”

Let’s take a quick look at how individuals are affected when a culture doesn’t have an adequate word for an important concept. Take a moment to imagine what would happen if we didn’t have a word for the act of thinking. “Thinking” is something that can’t be seen, touched, smelled, heard, tasted, or sensed. And, in this scenario, it can’t be discussed either. What would happen if you started thinking one day? Would you be able to describe your experience to others? Would they have any way to understand you? How would you feel if you knew what you were experiencing was not only real, but very important, and yet you had no way to get others to believe you? My guess is you’d feel discounted and possibly even crazy. You might even talk yourself into believing that “thinking” doesn’t exist, even though you know you’ve just experienced it.

This is the situation many of us face when we go through big transitions. We know we’re in the midst of powerful shifts, but we don’t have the words to validate, for ourselves or others, what we’re going through. As a result, we question ourselves and our sanity. This is tragic, for we desperately need to make peace with the process of change.

The Ubiquitous Nature of Change Excerpted from The Seasons of Change: Using Nature’s Wisdom to Grow through Life’s Inevitable Ups and Downs. Printed with permission of author - Carol McClelland, PhD.

For more information visit: Seasons of Change

Tags: Awareness, consciousness, reality, vision

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This article was published on Friday, August 17th, 2007 at 9:36 am and is filed under Book Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the Comments RSS Feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.