Inevitable change

A three part series: Reading the tea leaves, accepting the inevitable and bringing focus to the most promising sector of our economy.

For eons, civilization on Earth evolved slowly, innovation and change took place over decades and centuries, until the past few hundred years. Suddenly, an explosion of invention and progress gave society airplanes, cars, global wars, computers, skyscrapers, the Internet, global movement of goods and money, beauty, opportunity and destruction on a level never imagined. For the first time since we pulled our knuckles off the ground, humanity had gotten way out ahead of itself. So who could blame us for buying into the religion of growth for growth’s sake, materialism, globalization and all the ensuing collateral damage.

As this tsunami of advancement began to hit the shore in various forms, the subsequent growing pileup has awakened many to the realities of the positives and negatives of our two-century epoch. In the movie The Matrix, Morpheus offers Neo a choice between the blue pill or the red pill – blissful ignorance of illusion (blue) or embracing the sometimes painful truth of reality (red). Neo chooses red pill and all the pain of reality that goes with it, but also opens himself up to the beauty of possibility.

Our global, one-size-fits-all economy is becoming increasingly outmoded, and with the red pill now making its way into society’s bloodstream, there’s no turning back. As we begin to awake from our hangover and face the reality of recent years, we feel a pull toward something new and different. All around us there is an undercurrent that is slowly but surely transforming the nature and structure of business. It is driven by a cultural shift that seeks greater connection and creativity, living wage jobs, more sustainable lifestyles, empowerment and ownership, and owes much to our newly installed and exponentially growing biosphere connector – the Internet.

Since we’ve taken the red pill, we need to begin by shifting our thinking. Instead of focusing on the bad news as is de rigueur these days, let’s set our sights on the positive currents of our time.