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  • Tech burnout: Toffler said technology would become outdated faster and faster.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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[–] 92 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I’m absolutely shocked at how racist the future got.

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  • [–] [S] 23 points 1 year ago (3 children)
  • [–] 38 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] [S] 16 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Is this similar to violent crime? A lot of right wingers bemoan the increasing amount of violence in "blue states and cities". Except, almost by any way you can measure it, violent crime has been on the decrease for years now. Is racism becoming worse, or are you just becoming more aware of it?

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    I think it depends where you place the starting point. It's certainly less racist than the 1800s, or even the 1940s. But if you only measure your own lifetime (so call it starting at the early 1980s), I think it did dip in the late 90s, and stayed in the dip until about 2008. Then it came soaring back to 1980s levels.

    And now it feels like it's rising, being used as a tool of fascism.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)

    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

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    But I didn't say that the 70's were worse than the 1960's!!!

    I said the 1970's were worse than today.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    Compared to

    We're in agreement. My "nope" was directed at your question. The rest of my comment was illustrating why I'm shocked at how racist things have become. Because the trend was to improve until recently.

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  • [–] 26 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    I always feel like these posts are written by ChatGPT when I see multiple — in the text.

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  • [–] [S] 58 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I'll never forgive OpenAI for making the unordered list a reason to complain about content.

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  • [–] 23 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    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

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  • [–] 22 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    There are dozens of us that know how to type en- and em-dashes! Dozens I say!

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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I mean, I see the point, but chat GPT got it from somewhere. That somewhere being people writing like that.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I think that the use of em-dashes specifically is a result of either the preprocessing of the training data or postprocessing of the generated text. I doubt that the material the models are trained on (i.e. Reddit) contains more em-dashes that hyphens in the position of sentence breaks.

    But it definitely gets the use of dash as sentence break from people writing like that. If you ask ChatGPT in another language, whose users don't generally use dashes, e.g. Slovak, it won't use then as much.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    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.

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    [–] 18 points 1 year ago*

    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.

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  • [–] 15 points 1 year ago

    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.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    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.

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    [–] 7 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    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...

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 1 year ago

    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...

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

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

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    Fascism Shock, too.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    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?

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