The Irresistible Force is Meeting the Immovable Object

Jim Mason
2 min readMar 5, 2021

Something’s got to give …

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

The acceleration of change in human affairs is undeniable — from technology to population to environmental impact to climate. That is the irresistible force. At the same time, old limitations of human biology remain — we can’t learn much faster, stay much healthier, or live much longer than our recent ancestors did. We are the immovable object. The crunch is arriving as the rate of change is exceeding our individual and collective ability to adapt to the changes.

What will happen? Individual human suffering will increase. We already know that billions of people have inadequate water, food, shelter, and other basic necessities of life or are working at stressful, low-paying jobs just to survive. And many collective human enterprises will fail. That, too, is already happening as government, business, and other organizations designed for slower times have become overburdened and dysfunctional.

Those two trends have combined. Many people depend for their livelihoods on jobs working at dysfunctional organizations that produce mostly useless results. Two examples: Military preparedness industries, including the disastrous F-35 fighter plane development project, and predatory capitalist firms that do nothing but buy other companies to sell off their assets for profit.

--

--

Jim Mason

I study language, cognition, and humans as social animals. You can support me by joining Medium at https://jmason37-80878.medium.com/membership