We’ve got it pretty easy compared to the cavemen. Those prehistoric souls waged a constant battle for basic survival, and I’ll take central heating and modern medicine any day. Yet for all the innovations that have made life easier, we deal with a new kind of stress today. It’s the pressure of a never-ending learning curve—and make no mistake, it has a very real effect on your ability to survive.
For most of human history, adult life didn’t have much of a learning curve. Once you knew how to do something, it didn’t change.
Take tools, for instance. Our hominid ancestors first used basic stone tools about 3.4 million years ago. From there, it took another 2.8 million years for some clever mind to invent the bow and arrow. The pace of technological change moved at the speed of a glacier, which is to say that Grod and his fellow cave dwellers didn’t have to keep up with the latest trends in order to feed, clothe, or house themselves.
Tool-making was skilled, laborious work to be sure. But once Grod had it figured out, he was set.
Over the past half-million years or so, the pace of technological change has sped up remarkably. There was the agricultural revolution (about 12,000 years ago) and the wheel (some five thousand years ago). By the 1950s, navigating daily life meant knowing how to use a telephone, drive a car (or at least follow pedestrian traffic signals), tune in a TV or radio signal, operate a washing machine, and so on.
And those were just the basic skills of daily life: communication, food, clothing, transportation. We’re not even talking about the specialized skills needed for various jobs, like transportation or engineering—skillsets that changed much more rapidly. Still, the technological know-how needed to perform quotidian tasks changed very little over the course of an average person’s lifetime.
Today, it’s a constant treadmill of learning—and unlearning—daily life skills. We’ve gone from cash to cheques to credit cards to online banking and digital wallets. Those older methods still exist but they’re quickly dying out (according to a recent MSN article, the use of personal cheques in the U.S. has fallen by 75% since the year 2000).
With each change comes the need to learn new skills. That goes for the way we drive (infotainment screens, lane-change assist), the way we shop (navigating e-commerce sites), and even the way we socialize. It’s taken less than thirty years to go from the first true social media site to more than 5 billion social media users around the world today.
No wonder our brains feel like they’re on chronic overload. The daily life skills we needed ten or fifteen—or even five—years ago have changed drastically, and continue to do so.
Can you refuse to give in to the pressure of that never-ending learning curve? Of course, especially since we can still get by using the technology and skills we learned twenty years ago (though good luck finding a store or service willing to take a personal cheque these days).
But unlike our caveman Grod, we can’t just set it and forget it. The ways that we shop, travel, socialize, even file our taxes, keep changing. Just when we get one app or system figured out, a new one comes along.
For better or worse, surviving the modern world no longer involves successfully slaying a woolly mammoth. Instead, it comes down to how well we adjust to rapid change. We know that, given time, our ancient ancestors were able to adapt to the challenges they faced. The question now is whether we can keep up.
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