Future Shock, Updated

There’s an older phrase for what this feels like, originally coined by author Alvin Toffler in his 1970 book by the same name: Future Shock. This is the disorientation that comes when the rate of change exceeds our capacity to integrate it into a working identity. Today’s version is more intimate. The “shock” isn’t just external (“the world is changing”); it’s internal (“my sense of who I am at work needing constant updating”).

Cognitive load rises because the world demands more context switches: from human conversation to model trace, from narrative arc to parameter tweak. Each context switch has a cost, so the day feels full but fragmented. Symptoms: rereading the same doc, shallow focus, finishing less than you start.

Decision fatigue grows because you face a thousand “90% good” options instead of three flawed ones. Evaluating and re-evaluating them burns judgmental energy. Symptoms: deferring choices, defaulting to old habits, or over-optimizing trivialities.

Identity threat creeps in because the parts of you such as your pace, your rituals, the old ways you signaled mastery that were once central no longer map neatly to what the system needs. When your strengths feel less visible or less scarce, belonging and confidence wobble.

Symptoms: defensiveness about new tools, clinging to legacy steps, or quiet disengagement.
This all starts to feel faster and faster because the old approaches to coping can’t keep up with the tools being continuously updated, the network effects in a team, a company, an industry propagating new ideas so fast that what might have felt like advantage quickly feels like table stakes, and our roles being transformed not just once, but continuously.

Here are a few things this website will help you learn how to do in order to move from coping to thriving: first evaluate and name your evergreen strengths. Are you good at framing problems, earning trust, sense-making… and how do you become good at these activities; Next, how to make them visible in the workflow through rubrics, review notes, post-mortems; And finally how to use AI to build teachable artifacts from your tacit skills such as examples, guardrails, definitions of “what good looks like” so your value scales through both people and systems.
Future shock today is intimate, not abstract. It shows up as overloaded attention, overtaxed choices, and a wobbly sense of self. The antidote is to shift the level at which you operate: fewer switches, clearer rules, and identity rooted in strengths that don’t go out of date.

What Temporal Compression Changes (Beyond Speed)

Because generative AI can create at a faster pace than humans ever could, it sometimes seems like the individual tasks are getting smaller and the pace faster. But what is important, and where you focus, is that while a single instance of performing a task is quick, the machine also changes the work so that a larger number of instances are performed and the pattern they roll up to gets bigger. You’ll need to make more micro-decisions, but if you get lost in the weeds of the volume of decisions it will become overwhelming. Instead the story you’re telling with those decisions matters more than any single one. You used to own the work and the outcome. Now you own the feedback grammar that teaches a system.

Compression invites a bias toward testing. That doesn’t make intuition obsolete; it makes it accountable. In our business lives our experience allows us to start with our intuition and this is still the case. Pairing this with generative AI moves these hypotheses into a loop that can prove or refine them faster.

An analogy that helps is to shift your thinking to loops instead of lines.

Lines are how most of us were trained to work: plan → execute → deliver → done. They assume the world will stay still long enough for your plan to land intact. A line is like a timer, you set it and at some point it is complete.

Loops assume the world moves. You act, you measure what happened, you learn, and you adjust—then you go again. Same goal but now iterative, a different physics. A loop is like a thermostat, you set it and it continuously measures the temperature so that it can adjust the heating or air conditioning.

Lines deliver outcomes once; loops deliver outcomes continuously. Lines can build our personal tacit knowledge because the experience resides in our own brains and informs how we approach the next line. But this new world demands that we convert the tacit into the explicit and inform the continuous process of the machine. In working with generative AI, think of adjusting a thermostat, not setting a timer.

Your third exercise

If you recognize the challenges laid out in here as your own, try doing the following as you move to the next section, here is a link to a diagnostic worksheet so you can save your answers for later review:

Click for Exercise 3: Loops Instead of Lines

• Name the change, not just the speed. It’s not only faster; it’s a different composition of value. You won’t find your footing by trying to do the old thing quicker. You’ll find it by moving up a level and learning what part of you the new loop needs next.
• Translate tacit knowledge into explicit signals. Try to write down the tacit rules you carry. Redefine work from setting a timer (a line) to adjusting a thermostat (a loop).
• Choose a loop you can love. Your motivation will not survive a pace you resent. Pick a part of the stack where your curiosity wakes up (prompt design, evaluation, synthesis, narrative) and lead from there.
• Protect human time for human work. Compression can flatten days into clicks. Guard space for conversation, values, and the slow thinking that gives fast work its aim.

We’ll get more precise about adaptability in the next sections. We’ll cover how bodies and brains learn, what “plasticity” really means, and how individual change nests inside cultural change. In a world living in fast-forward, your job isn’t to outrun the pace of change. It’s to define a higher order level of adaptation where you thrive by working and thinking on a new scale, even as the underlying components of your world change ever faster.