Irresponsibles Anonymous

What is the third wave?

In 1979, futurist Alvin Toffler wrote a book called Future Shock, where he goes into the process of change in social, political and economic structure.

Alvin describes three “waves”, the first one being the Agrarian Revolution (8000 A.C.  Until the 17^th Century), during which we built the social paradigms needed to end our nomadic phase and construct the cities that gave origin to our civilization.

The second wave  was the industrial revolution (1650), changing the way the world was organized by replacing human effort with advanced tools, thus empowering mass production and expansion, the caveat was that it led to a unification of products, media and ideology, all because of the inflexibility of our tools at the time.

According to Toffler, in 1979 we were in the cusp of a third wave, in which the tools become flexible enough to bring about a change in production paradigm oriented towards individuality and self-expression.

The advent of customized products coupled with the recently established Internet would bring about an important change in human society characterized by decentralization, demassification and personalization… all necessary to satisfy the human need to differentiate. continue reading…

“Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted” – Randy Paush

There are some very wonderful things about a bad day. They teach you about the value of true friendship, the importance of honesty, the humility in recognizing what you did wrong… But only if you take your stake in the bad day and claim what responsibilities you had in making it so.

It’s very rare when a bad day happens suddenly and with no build up, most of the time there is a “prequel” a story to tell regarding how things got to this point, and when you look, without justifications and excuses, at your role in this tale, there are always valuable lessons to be learned.

Things come to light and are revealed as they are, nasty situations become resolved (one way or the other) and the road is paved for a new solution.

Maybe bad days have gotten a this negative reputation because we need to avoid recognizing what we did wrong, or we want to prolong the situation as long as we can because we fear reprisals, but I think that if you start truly seeing what happened (and writing it down), you can get some valuable experience and, who knows, maybe even start looking forward to a few bad days.