Back in 1970, Alvin Toffler wrote Future Shock, where he introduced the idea that too much rapid change could leave people feeling overwhelmed, stressed, and disconnected. He called it "future shock" — and honestly, reading it today feels almost eerie with how accurate he was.
Toffler believed we were moving from an industrial society to a "super-industrial" one, where everything would change faster than people could handle. The book was a huge hit at the time, selling over six million copies, but what's crazy is how much of what he talked about feels even more true in 2025. Some examples:
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Disposable culture: He predicted throwaway products, and now we have single-use plastics, fast fashion, and gadgets that feel obsolete within a year.
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Tech burnout: Toffler said technology would become outdated faster and faster. Today, if you don’t upgrade your phone or update your software, you feel left behind.
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Rent instead of own: Services like Airbnb and Uber fit his prediction that we’d move away from owning things and toward renting everything.
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Job instability: He nailed the rise of the gig economy, freelancing, and how fast-changing industries make it hard to stay trained up and secure.
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Transient relationships: He warned about shallow, fleeting social connections — something social media, dating apps, and global mobility have absolutely amplified.
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Information overload: This term literally came from Future Shock, and if you've ever felt exhausted just from scrolling through your feeds or reading the news, you know exactly what he meant.
Toffler also talked about the "death of permanence" — not just products, but relationships, jobs, even identities becoming temporary and interchangeable. He warned it would cause "shattering stress and disorientation." Looking around at the rising rates of anxiety, depression, and burnout today, it’s hard not to see what he meant.
I think about this book a lot when I read about some of the sick things happening today. Is this a warped perspective?
Information Overload. The march doesn't matter. The people who did the upsetting thing have already gone on to do several more upsetting things by the time we've started marching against the first one. The people reporting about the upsetting thing miss the point but it doesn't matter because nobodies actually paying attention, it's just fluff on in the background. The white noise we need to go about our day maintaining some false sense of "staying up to date" when it's impossible to do. The torrent of information comes from all over the globe and never stops growing. Even if everything is suddenly perfect in your neighborhood, city, state, or country, it doesn't matter because there's a genocide somewhere else, and the pope died, and there's a famine and a new study that says the sweet treats you like are going to kill you and the stock market is down but it's back up by the time you check and you should've bought the dip so you could actually retire but you were too busy ignoring a TV while looking at bad news on your phone and eating a sweet treat because nothing feels real anymore and you just need a hit of dopamine before you start panicking and reach for the gun in the nightstand to put a bullet in your brain because at least the bullet will be real and the silence afterwards won't be temporary.