Читать книгу The Lessons School Forgot - Steve Sammartino - Страница 11

If you're wondering why change is so hard for us to cope with, it's because we've been programmed for stability, indoctrinated from the age of innocence to believe in a system that is now obsolete. From the moment we are capable of comprehension, we are shaped into little industrialised robots awaiting instructions from the corporate or governmental algorithm. It's not our fault that change is so uncomfortable. The 200 years of the industrial era, despite its world wars and depressions, led to a long period of systemic stability and unsurpassed material prosperity. For many generations we have had the formula for living an increasingly prosperous life, and the industrial revolution delivered against this promise big time.

As I wrote in my first book, The Great Fragmentation, we now live better than royalty did before this revolution, and anything that threatens to upend that comfort is fearsome. We fret at the possibility of change not only because we've never had it so good, but because we've been told all our lives to leave the big important stuff to the people in charge of the systems in which we obediently participate. Economically we have been coddled, so much so that we have come to believe our system was designed to serve us in perpetuity. It's now clear that is not going to be the case. The system is changing dramatically, and we need to change our personal business models to recognise this. We have a choice:

1. We can wait for the system to get better.

2. Or we can reinvent ourselves, redesigning our lives and in the process helping reshape the system (which I go into in detail in Part III, ‘Reinvention').

We've been treated like economic outpatients waiting for the government and our once reliable institutions to provide for us, believing they will provide us with the opportunities we need, and all our social and economic needs, so long as we work hard. It's not surprising we think like this – they trained us to think they would continue to provide jobs and security. Well, they're not going to. The incentive structure of management tells the simple tale of why it can't and won't happen.