Lesson Eleven: No Conclusion to This

“I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.” -Thomas Jefferson

Usually I write a small conclusion at the end. But to bring home the truth that the future will evolve continuously and that no one will ever have the final word, I will just leave you with a bit of advice.

As I wrote earlier, you can always look at any change from a positive or negative frame of mind. Whether you like change or not, someone, somewhere will invent the next big thing, and that in turn will propel a dozen other innovations. At the peak of innovation in any area, we will inevitably have to take a 1/4th U-Turn. One day we will start living on other planets, and even then we’ll repeat the same process. This is bound to keep on happening. From an ethical point of view, there will be always be a mix of the good and the bad. You can never eliminate the negatives. You can only minimize them. If we now have thefts of property, in the future we will have cyber thefts and mind thefts. So we’ll have to invent new laws and new kind of law-enforcement to keep us safe. If we now worry about the saturated fat in our diets, in a few decades we may have to go on radiation-reduction diets.

So what is the bottom line here? It’s quite simple- since our caveman (and cave-woman) days we have held the hope for a better and brighter future, and future generations will continue to have even bigger hopes. The faster we adapt to change and appreciate the future, the better it will be for us.

You can look at all the negatives and be blindsided by what is to come, or you can focus on the positives and drive the change as it happens. The choice is yours!