This above, is the world that the Greatest Generation, the Baby Boomers, and my posse, Generation X were born into. Assembly line jobs defined the 20th century, that was how over half of working Americans earned their living. To people over about 40 years old, this is the "normal" we grew up with. The vast majority of people in the U.S., and the industrialized world, worked jobs they hated, but that paid well. Little thought or creativity was needed, and most jobs were a monotonous grind, day after day. Workers did their 40 or 50 hours, lived for the weekend, and coped with it, to feed and raise their families. This, above, is what the late Industrial Age was like, this is what we are still in transition from.
When I was in 8th grade, in 1979, in the small town of Willard, Ohio, we had a "Career Day." All of us kids in junior high were herded onto buses. One of our teachers told us, "A few of you may go to college and become doctors, lawyers, or accountants. But most of you will spend the rest of your lives working in one of the four factories we are going to visit today." Everyone's heads dropped. We were all depressed at the idea of being stuck in this tiny little town, working lame jobs, just like our parents, for the rest of our lives. With very few exceptions, our parents always bitched and moaned about their jobs. That was life for most people in the Industrial Age. Jobs paid well, the men worked rote factory or office jobs, and most women stayed home with the kids. Most families could buy a house, by saving for a few years first, on a single income. But very, very few people actually liked their jobs. That was in 1979, the day our school disillusioned all of us kids. Yeah, the Willard Flashes basketball team kicked ass, and you could water ski at Holiday Lakes, but many of us figured there must be more to life than that. It wasn't just us kids in Willard thinking that, it was kids and teens all over the country, and other parts of the world.
Every little town had one or more busy factories, all with assembly lines. Larger towns and cities had many factories. Pollution from these poured into local rivers, lakes, and harbors. The Cuyahoga River running through Cleveland, actually caught on fire for three or four days once, when I was a kid. The river... water... caught on fire, because it was so polluted.
The Midwest industrial cities were booming, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and the rest poured out all kinds of products, "Made in America." The same was true across the U.S., and it was similar in other industrialized nations. Those products went to warehouses, and then to huge department stores in shopping malls. That's where our families went on the weekends to buy clothes, tools, car tires, applicances, and big, warm, soft pretzels, which were 39 cents each. Life moved slow, every small town's Main Street had several bustling, local, "Mom and Pop" businesses. Most families went on a one or two week vacation each summer. In Ohio that meant a trip to Lake Erie (Cedar Point) if you were middle class, and Florida if your parents were a bit better off. When I was a kid, if another kid said they were from Detroit, we thought, "your dad makes MONEY," because the auto plants there were thriving, and paid really well then.
Houses had two phones sharing one line, that the whole family shared. We had those new, big, color TV's, which had three channels, and a few fuzzy UHF channels to watch. Most adults had hobbies like bowling, fishing, target shooting, model railroads, ceramics, knitting, or something else they did in their spare time. People actually had "spare" time. Think about that one. Sometimes after dinner on Sunday, my family would go for a "Sunday drive," just drive around the region aimlessly, just for something to do. Those drives were cool, because it was fresh scenery, and usually ended with an ice cream cone.
But right around the time my classmates and I got disillusioned by "Career Day," something else started happening. I think it was 1978 when I first heard adults talking about a factory shutting down. That was unheard of then. But a company, a whole factory, in nearby Bucyrus, I think, closed down. All of the workers got laid off. The owners moved the whole business, and built a new factory, far away, in a distant land, where people worked for much less money... Alabama. That was the first I remember hearing of what became known as "outsourcing jobs." Yes, the early outsourcing of jobs from Midwestern facotry towns and cities, went largely to the American South, then Taiwan, Mexico mequliadoras, and then to places like South Korea, Vietnam, Pakistan, and ultimately, China. During those same years, the late 1970's to early 2000's, industrial robots and new technology also took millions of Ameircan factory jobs.
Futurist Alvin Toffler, brainstorming with his wife Heidi, published his second major book, The Third Wave, in 1980. It forecast that new technologies of many kinds were beginning to completely transform society as we knew it. The Tofflers explained that we were moving out of an Industrial-based society, and into an information-based society. Many people read their books. Many more of us didn't hear of their books until years later, if ever. It was their 1990 book, Powershift, that first caught my attention.
Things like cable TV, touchtone phones, fax machines, VCR's, home video cameras, and the big one, the Apple Macintosh, and subsequent personal computers, began to completely change the work world in the late 1970's and 1980's, right as us older Generation X kids were going through high school and into college. The good news was that the Toffler's were right, we were in transition out of the Industrial Age, as we now refer to it, and into the Information Age. Us Gen X kids, and the younger generations, were not stuck in routine assembly line jobs, for the most part. The downside was that about 1/3 of the new jobs that evolved, mostly tech oriented, paid really well, better than those old factory jobs. But the other 2/3 of jobs, mostly service jobs, paid a lot less. In addition, for a whole bunch of reasons, real wages for most workers had declined, compared to prices of goods, ever since.
I got into a weird new sport of BMX freestyle in high school, when living in Boise, Idaho, in the early 80's. I somehow managed to stumble into the BMX industry as a 20-year-old, which led me on a far different path than my former Idaho and Ohio classmates. In my 20's, I was surrounded by young entrepreneurs, building their own businesses from scratch, and by pro and top amateur action sports athletes. By getting into new sports, which really weren't even sports, by traditional standards, collectively, we created a whole new world of sports, and industries to support them. Skateboarding, snowboarding, inline skating, rock climbing, and other sports were following the lead of surfing, spreading worldwide.
Being a geeky BMX guy, I started reading a ton about business, and then personal development, to try and get over my personal shyness and inability to get my own business started. The main reason was because I was afraid to sell to people, which is key to any business. No sales, no business.
I wound up working a bunch of odd jobs, while reading 250 or so books over 20 years, and watching the financial and real estate markets. I also saw the growth of action sports from the inside out, learning a ton about how ideas and new trends build and spread through society, without realizing I was learning it. Trying to figure out where business and economic trends are heading has been a huge interest of mine since the early 1990's.
As the interenet began to take over music, media, and commerce in the 2000's and early 2010's, I began to realize that The Third Wave that AlvinToffler explained, was still playing out. And THAT is why we are not in the Industrial Age anymore, but were are not in the true Information Age either. I believe we are still in between the two ages, in transition. Many things, like telecommuncations, computers, music, video/TV/Film, and publishing, have pretty much made the transition into the Information Age. But many other things, like education, banking, housing/real estate, government, law, politics, and other institutions, are still working largely from Industrial Age models. All of them use a lot of new technology, but the underlying business models or frameworks have not moved to a digital/tech native form yet.
And that is why the world seems so crazy these days. At the core, millions of people, and much of our work, social, fnancial, political, and business lives, are still somewhere in between the Industrial Age world and the Information Age world. I call this late stage of this transition period, The Big Freakin' Transition, and I've written quite a bit about it (I added the word "freakin" to distinguish it from other "Big Transition" thoughts on the internet). But the idea is still largely unknown to just about everyone. I think that if people hear this idea, it makes a lot of sense, and helps our current, chaotic world make more sense, as well. It's a bit like the whole world is going through puberty all at once, just less horny. We used to be one thing, now we're in between, but not quite the new thing yet.
We have a huge population of poor and homeless people, myself included at the moment, who have fallen through the cracks in work or social lives. As a society, we haven't figure out housing in a world where the high paying tech jobs mostly cluster in a few major metros, driving up rent and mortgage prices to astronomical levels for lower paid workers. We have all kinds of financial systems, new and old, now in play, with fiat money losing steam and crypto gaining steam , and about 25 different ways to pay for a burger, or a cup of coffee, or a new car. The deep, underlying issue is this continuing transition from older business and social models to new tech and info adapted models.
On top of all that messy transition stuff, right now we have high price inflation and another recession (maybe a depression) here or looming. AND we have major climate issues, like floods, falling river/lake levels out west, heat waves, massive forest fires, and changing weather patterns. And we have major drug epidemics, which include a lot of the same people who can't find good paying work in the places they grew up. We have hundreds of small towns and cities that are dying on the vine, while major metros keep swelling. OK, the pandemic led to out migrations of big cities in 2020 and 2021, but I think we will see that trend reverse in time. There are so many abandoned factories, malles, and other buildings in the U.S., that Urban Exploring, or UrbEx, is a pastime for many Millennials and Gen Z people. I used a video of Rolling Acres Mall from Akron, Ohio in that last link for two reasons. 1) Rolling Acres became famous in about 2014, as one of the earliest examples of a dead mall, before the term, "Retail Apocalypse" was invented. 2) I was born in Barberton, Ohio, about three miles from the site of Rolling Acres Mall. Although we moved from the area before I was 3-years-old, my grandparents lived about ten miles away, and this is a mall we visited when I was a kid sometimes, back when it was thriving in the 1970's. The places thousands of people worked and shopped when I was a kid are now often creepy, abandoned buildings to explore and shoot video for today's teens and young people. Transition.
The point is, we have so many different levels of change happening, that nearly everyone is overwhelmed. When people feel overwhelmed, they draw back, into the customs they grew up in , which may seem under attack. That leads to poltical "tribalism," along with racial, sexist, cultural prejudice, and other divides. We devlove into an "us" versus "them" world, across lines we used to think of as "us" on a large scale.
The Tofflers put the start of the transition period, between the Industrial Age and the Information Age, way back in 1956. That's when "white collar" office workers first outnumbered "blue collar" factory workers in the United States. The long period of change began very slowly, from one age to another. As new innovations came out and were adopted by people, change began to accelerate, with one form of technology or one new social norm, building upon others.
So now we are in the late stages of this long period of transition, and change is happening all over the place, all around us, and it's driving us all kind of nuts. Huge amounts of change do that to societies. As I pieced all these ideas together, I began to believe that the financial issues of the 2020's, one or more major recessions, or possibly a great depression, would force change on many people, businesses, and institutions that have been resisting change so far. I think this will be the craziest decade of this long, 80 or 90 year transition period. It feels crazy, because it IS crazy.
But we have models to look at now. We've seen the factories shut down, and we survived. We've seen phones go from the kitchen wall and parents' bedroom, to a tiny supercomputer in everyone's pocket, that can communicate with most of the world. We've seen music go from 8 tracks and records to CD's, MP3's and now streaming. We survived. Books, thank God, are still available as books, but also as digital versions. Three channels of lame ass network TV (millions of people watched Hee Haw every week when I was a kid), have turned to lots of quality streaming, and millions of options (many nearly as lame ass as Hee Haw), on the internet. We watched Sears, J.C. Penney, and Kmart (blue light special anyone?) die off, as the Retail Apocalypse exploded, then quelled during the pandemic. At the same time, over the last 25 years, we saw Amazon, eBay, thousands of Shopify and Etsy online stores, and buy online/pick-up in store models happen. And we survived an actual depression in the Spring of 2020, AND a 100 year pandemic. If you're reading this, you have survived all that. We can figure out housing, crypto, functional banking, education, and how to count votes as well as we count stock trades. And NFT's. Someday, even $400,000 monkey JPEG's may make sense. to most people. Hey,you figured out internet porn pretty damn quickly back in the day, didn't you. (Pause now to delete your browser history).
Yes, the world IS crazy. A big part of that is because we are in the middle of a Big Freakin' Transition that involves millions of small transitions. If this basic idea makes some sense, then my blog is beginning to do its job. My work here is to help anyone interested to navigate what I call The Tumultuous 2020's, survive the crazy parts, and look for opportunities that will help you thrive as time goes on. That's my job here. I hope that helps this make sense. Now go create something this world needs. Or go back to work, since most people who read my blog do it when they're supposed to be working at their real job.
