A Pair of 50ths
As I write this, I am in Flushing, Queens, New York City, watching the Macy's fireworks show over the East River. That's a great place to be on the semiquincentennial (250th anniversary) of the United States' Indepedence Day. We didn't watch it from close up as one might wish, because there were severe thunderstorms — so we settled for the TV in the hotel room.
50 years ago today, on the 4th of July 1976, I was in the 4th of July parade in Bristol Rhode Island. They make a big deal out of the fact that this parade is part of the longest-running Independence Day celebration in the country — every year starting in 1785. That's a great place to be on the American bicentennial — but though I was in the parade, those watching along the central part of the route (including the TV crews) didn't see me because most of the parade was diverted by a bomb scare.
While I reflect on this 50th anniversary of two related events, I realise that I have a far more personal 50th anniversary this year.
As a 12-year-old nerd in 1976 I was fascinated by science, technology, and related topics that gave insight into what life would be like in the later part of my expected lifetime. As a younger boy I had taken an interest mainly in the sort of things one saw in the 1964 World's Fair (right here in Flushing), Disney's Tomorrowland, and Epcot Center's CommuniCore (the area around Spaceship Earth, in its original form prior to 1994): space travel, computers, robots, and so on. But by age 12 I recognised there was a lot more to the future than one saw on The Jetsons, and popular books on such topics caught my eye. Some, such as George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, warned of some of the negative consequences of human nature that would be enabled by technology.
But one book stood out not just by warning of future consequences, but by observing how such things already existed in the 1970s. While human nature remains the same, the knowledge and development of techniques (technology in an earlier sense of the word) contributes to its own acceleration. This creates trends that were quite clear by the mid-1960s when authors Alvin Toffler and Adelaide Farrell began working on their book, Future Shock, published in 1970.
Technological advances in the preservation and communication of information had enabled people to get more of each other's ideas, and this greatly increased the choices they had in anything from what story to read at the library to where to go on vacation to what career to pursue. Many of these choices resulted in contact between people of different cultural backgrounds — so even a person seeking information only on what national park to visit, would nonetheless be exposed to new religious or political beliefs. Such new knowledge would occasionally lead to individual changes in lifestyle, and even those averse to change themselves would encounter changes among family, friends, and neighbours.
Almost all technological developments provide: not a way to accomplish something new, but a way to accomplish in less time something that people had already been accomplishing. Often said to be the most valuable resource, time is something nearly anyone will want to save. That enticement prompts rapid adoption of the new technique (or even just desiring the knowledge thereof, to pass on to others).
All is well, until one considers that instead of using that "saved" time to do something old, like relax in nature, the beneficiary of technology would typically spend that time doing something else that had recently been made faster. They were leading a more hectic life.
This phenomenon has continued over the 50 years I have been aware of it, and has heightened, intensified, and strengthened. From generation to generation, opportunities to think about things have continually increased in frequency, as have requirements to make decisions — and at every time scale. We make more major life decisions per decade than any earlier generation; we make more small decisions per day than at any time before; we recieve more mental stimuli per minute than ever — and by stimuli I specifically include anything that is an opportunity to make a tiny decision, like swipe left vs. swipe right.
The work that the brain does to handle these decisions, opportunities for thinking, and stimuli requires something that takes time to restore. Each person has a limit to how much of this their brain can do, and the impact of the higher frequency is decision stress. I use this term to refer to decision fatigue and similar but far milder effects that accompany all forms of mental decision. Decision stress is the effect of the mental effort that a small part of the brain makes when "deciding" whether to pay attention to a stimulus, whether that stimulus be external, or one part of the brain signaling another.
In the 1960s the heightened occurrence of nervous breakdowns led the Future Shock authors to investigate and identify the social and technological causes of decision stress. Due to the intensification and acceleration, things have gotten a lot worse than in the 60s and 70s — and everyone feels it, though we almost always speak only of its impacts, and even then we each see different facets of the impact and use different language to describe it. In our times, we must all address and mitigate decision stress at all levels — in ourselves, in relationships, in our families and teams and groups, in our organisations, in society, and for all Mankind.
It's like in that film Independence Day except that the aliens and their technology are ourselves and our own creations. This is the battle we must fight — for our Independence from the impact of changing times on the health and well-being of ourselves and on every aspect of our various ways of life.
Mankind, let this be our Independece Day!
This page was written in the "embarrassingly readable" markup language RHTF, and was last updated on 2026 Jul 05.
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