Changing Times

When it comes to accepting new ideas, people are usually fifty years behind the main drift. Most people are afraid of change since they see new ideas as being frightening, and accept them only when the things they held dear are gone or hopelessly obsolete. It’ll take some time before we start restructuring everything considered untouchable now, only to wonder how we managed without it for so long a little later. And the irony of it: we ridicule people who are so “unrealistic” as to come up with the new idea, then we later sneer at those who are so “unrealistic” as to try to live without it.

One of my favorite ads shows a man standing in the street as another man is walking (horizontally) on the wall next to him with the caption: “those who keep insisting that it can’t be done are always interrupted by those who do”. My college professor warned us in the early days of CAD (Computer Aided Design) that, for technology in general, first it becomes a “possibility”, then it becomes a “necessity”.