Dude, I look at 1993 and compare it to today and am totally amazed at how much life has changed.
In 1993, your circle of friends was pretty much limited to the people in your town. Maybe you had a pen pal, but that was considered to be a rare novelty and took real work to maintain. Now, I have friends all over the world, that I keep up on their day-to-day lives. When an earthquake hit SF in 1989, my reaction was "Oh, that's too bad, I feel bad for anyone who died. I'm sure we'll be talking about this in school today." When an earthquake hit Japan in 2011, my reaction was "Has anyone heard from Jennifer yet? Is she okay? I know she was in Sendai..." And I had friends all over the globe - India, Colombia, DC, Boston, Morocco, LA - asking the same thing.
In 1993, if you were meeting a friend for an event at an unfamiliar place, you called them up beforehand, specified an exact time and place that you would be, wrote down the directions or brought along a road map, and prayed they would be there when they said they would. If you got lost, you had to pull over until you could look at the map and memorize new directions. If you couldn't find each other in the crowd, you were out of luck. If you hit traffic on the way in, you'd hope they didn't think they were being stood up and apologize profusely. Now, your calendar pops open a notification when it's time to leave, taking into account traffic. You hit a button, and your cell phone navigates to the destination, automatically rerouting you if you take a wrong turn. You can't find your friend, you call or text them. You don't know what they look like, you call them and see whose phone rings.
In 1993, if you wanted to start a company, you worked your butt off for a big employer to learn the ropes of your industry. You spread your network as far as it could go. You sought out mentors. You begged for funding. And then you hired lots of people to make your dreams come true, and if your dreams were wrong, they all got laid off a couple years later. Now, you Google [startup]. You read a bunch of blogs. You download lots of open-source software. You build something, you launch it, you post it on Hacker News and a bunch of blogs, and if your dreams were wrong, you've wasted maybe a year of your life.
If your life isn't all that different from 1993, it's more likely because you're still living in the past than because the world is the same as 1993. "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet." For some people, the world is wildly different from what they expected 20 years ago.
In 1993, your circle of friends was pretty much limited to the people in your town. Maybe you had a pen pal, but that was considered to be a rare novelty and took real work to maintain. Now, I have friends all over the world, that I keep up on their day-to-day lives. When an earthquake hit SF in 1989, my reaction was "Oh, that's too bad, I feel bad for anyone who died. I'm sure we'll be talking about this in school today." When an earthquake hit Japan in 2011, my reaction was "Has anyone heard from Jennifer yet? Is she okay? I know she was in Sendai..." And I had friends all over the globe - India, Colombia, DC, Boston, Morocco, LA - asking the same thing.
In 1993, if you were meeting a friend for an event at an unfamiliar place, you called them up beforehand, specified an exact time and place that you would be, wrote down the directions or brought along a road map, and prayed they would be there when they said they would. If you got lost, you had to pull over until you could look at the map and memorize new directions. If you couldn't find each other in the crowd, you were out of luck. If you hit traffic on the way in, you'd hope they didn't think they were being stood up and apologize profusely. Now, your calendar pops open a notification when it's time to leave, taking into account traffic. You hit a button, and your cell phone navigates to the destination, automatically rerouting you if you take a wrong turn. You can't find your friend, you call or text them. You don't know what they look like, you call them and see whose phone rings.
In 1993, if you wanted to start a company, you worked your butt off for a big employer to learn the ropes of your industry. You spread your network as far as it could go. You sought out mentors. You begged for funding. And then you hired lots of people to make your dreams come true, and if your dreams were wrong, they all got laid off a couple years later. Now, you Google [startup]. You read a bunch of blogs. You download lots of open-source software. You build something, you launch it, you post it on Hacker News and a bunch of blogs, and if your dreams were wrong, you've wasted maybe a year of your life.
If your life isn't all that different from 1993, it's more likely because you're still living in the past than because the world is the same as 1993. "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet." For some people, the world is wildly different from what they expected 20 years ago.