If you fell into a deep coma 30 years ago and manage to wake up only now, would you be startled, jolted, amazed, disturbed, excited, electrified with an entirely new world around you?
Back then, the telephone, telegram and snail mails (well, you may also include the tin cans) were the only means to communicate to friends and relatives from the other parts of the globe.
Do you remember crunching your thoughts so they could fit in a single sentence (without comma or period) when using telegrams? How about the memory of placing long distance or overseas calls to loved ones using IDD cards? Still recall writing a mail and inserting paper money (enough to buy a letter stamp) so the recipient would not have any excuse not to write you back?
Not only were these methods slow and inconvenient but they were also damn very expensive.
If I can talk to my teenager self and tell him that he can directly communicate with his friend or relative anytime and anywhere he wants at the cost of nothing (well not entirely nothing because you still have to pay for the mobile data or internet connection), he probably won't believe me.
The invention of the Internet has changed everything - the way we work, the way we do things, the way we communicate with people.
For the better or worse? Well, it entirely depends on your perspective.
Technology has always been constantly developed to help solve worldwide problems and achieve specific goals. It is intended to somehow make our lives much easier. Better? Probably.
The Internet has made it possible for us to easily access a vast amount of information and connect with others across the globe and this has opened up new opportunities for education, communication, and commerce. Now, even without a college education, you can survive in this new generation dominated by content creators, crypto traders, digital advertisers and marketers, and software developers. How many Tiktokers and YouTubers are making more money than Lawyers and Doctors right now? I'm not advocating that kids skip school ok? I'm merely stating facts.
Interested in learning new skills? There's YouTube, Coursera, Udemy, Linkedin, Udacity, Edx, Skillshare, Alison, Khan Academy, to name a few. You can even enrol at Stanford, and several Ivy schools like Harvard and Yale for free. Some schools even offer a free masters degree education. Need research? Just go to your favorite search engine (or even better, use ChatGPT-3 which I will explain in another post). Need remote jobs? There's Upwork, Hired, Flex Jobs, Jobspresso, Remote OK, Just Remote, JS Remotely, Daily Remote, Remote Leaf, Remote Work, Remote Leads, AngelList Talent, Working Nomads, Product Hunt Jobs, and We Work Remotely to name a few.
New AI-powered tools like deepfake, writing assistants, text to image, text to audio, fraud detection, chatbots, process automations represent another revolution that make the future much more exciting but also at the same time downright scary.
When everything's at your fingertips, expectations are also expectedly higher. With all the tools and resources readily available, you are expected to be 2x, 3x or even 100x much more productive. Everything is already spoon-fed to you unlike before when you have to toil a lot of hours in the school or public library (well it really is just an excuse to spend time looking at your crush), spend a lot of money photocopying pages you'd never use and putting up with school nerds who only care about lifting their scholastic bravado. You are expected to get things done (and probably more). Anything below that is a failure. A massive failure. I just wonder if today's generation has the mental wherewithal or fortitude to accept such outcome.
During our time, when we want to accomplish something, we had to put a lot of sweat, blood and tears into it. From elementary to high school, to college, to graduate school, we were wired to do the most difficult things and did things the hard way. Nothing came easy. So when things don't go our way, we never break, we never crumble.
