It's like a low-grade fever that never quite goes away but never quite blossoms into a full-blown virus either, this anxiety we live with. It does not yet feel threatening, but the low-grade fatigue that settles over us like a shroud reminds us of its presence. This is what living at a moment of massive historical change is like.
We may get up every day and make the coffee, brush our teeth, and set loose the routines of our lives, but around us the forces of change are reshaping our lives. The two forces themselves are tightly wound: globalism and the social hive that is the internet. Between the two of them, they are a bundle of creative destruction, and we're at the center of that storm.
Neither force is new, but they have matured to the point that we begin to feel the fever spiking. The internet has made the world even smaller. I can Skype a friend in New Delhi with full video. But thanks to mobile phones, I can also now talk to someone in remote Khargar, 560 miles from New Delhi. The internet allows us to connect, and with that to collaborate. In the open-source world that is the internet, the "hive" of people, strangers working on a small part of a problem, can work faster and smarter than any one person or team on a shop floor. The work is distributed in new ways, and work itself takes on new forms. This type of working and learning-collaboratively-challenges the order of things. Hierarchical structures, like boss-floor manager-unit assembler, evaporate. That causes anxiety.
Yet we are unprepared for this new order. Our schools are woefully behind in preparing the next generation for this new world. Cathy Davidson, in her new book, "Now You See It," decries the institutional sluggishness in the face of change. Our schools, she says, still start with a bell and marches through the day like children preparing for work in a factory.
"Industrial era education," Davidson told me in a recent interview, "was about time management: you start everyone at the same age. That's odd. Before the 18th century this wasn't the case. Suddenly we have to start school at 6 a.m. Math is from 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. You close your book at 9:00 and start spelling whether you're finished with math or not."
That mechanized, time-stamped method of learning doesn't work in this new world, she says.
Thomas Friedman, in his new book, "That Used to be Us," says that collaborative, distributed learning and working means that average is over. We have at our fingertips ready access to cheaper labor, cheaper software. We can no longer assume we're good enough. We now compete with our global neighbors. We need to up our game to stay in it. What we need from our kids is ideas and innovations. They must be able to think creatively on their feet. Education, Friedman says, should be teaching kids how to invent their job.
We're thick in the middle of creative destruction, and it's uncomfortable. It's particularly uncomfortable for young adults, who stand with one foot stuck in an institution that does not teach them the skills they need and the other foot in the ruthless global marketplace that demands critical reasoning, problem-solving, and creativity in order to just get an interview.
The fever pitch of competition and the speed of our lives means everyone is a commodity. Everyone must continually justify their job, even the boss. We practically have to reinvent our job as we're doing it, just to stay in the game.
Young men are in many ways ground zero of this "big shift." They serve as a stand-in for the outdated institutions. It is their life that the school day strives to reflect-a breadwinner whose job depends on hierarchy and routine, standardized jobs with punch clocks, conformity, and automation. It is their world that has shattered, yet one would never know it walking into a school today. It is only when they leave the confines of that past era that they realize how ill-equipped they are.
The low-grade anxiety is why journalists call with the same question, "what's wrong with men today? Is it internet porn? Is it bad parenting? If they only worked harder. If they only stopped being so lazy. If they weren't so spoiled.
If only.
We're pointing the blame in the wrong direction. We should be looking outward at our social institutions that are preparing our young people for the world they will enter. They (we) are failing them. It is not this latest generation who is at fault. It is all of us. We have prepared them for a life that no longer exists.
