Floppy Disks to AirDrop: The Inflation of Adaptation

I am turning 40 soon. It is not the number itself that makes me take a little pause, but what it represents. Growing up in India and watching constant transformations all around, it feels like I've spent most part of my life adapting to a world that seems to keep updating its operating system!

The world I knew as a child had fewer choices, less connectivity and a much more local way of living. Over the decades, opportunities have expanded, technology has become accessible at an extraordinary scale and we have a deeply connected global economy and digital world today. I guess what is distinctive about my generation is that we remember the before and the after. We have a comparative memory, and understand that today's convenience was not always a given, as we watched and contributed to it being built.

But something else has changed along the way, the social contract around work and careers. There was once a fairly straightforward proposition: get a good education, earn a degree, find a respectable job, build expertise and progress. A degree was never a guarantee, but it carried a certain durability. Today, while education is still important, the shelf life of professional relevance has shortened. Skills need updating. Careers need reinventing. Businesses need pivoting. And every time we demonstrate that we can adapt, a new expectation is created!

In 2013, in the early part of my career, I spent a few hours one weekend exploring something related to work and showed it to my manager. A few days later, he expected me to spend another weekend working on something that wasn't even a priority and deliver it on Monday. I refused, as I did not like how my voluntary act earlier had quietly become an expectation.

I think something similar is happening at a global scale. We demonstrate that we can learn a new technology, change roles, enter new markets, reinvent ourselves or navigate another disruption. Every successful adaptation quietly raises the baseline for the next one. What was once outstanding becomes normal, and what once demonstrated initiative becomes an obligation. 

While technology has actually made many things dramatically easier, the effort and cost required to remain relevant keeps rising because the environment keeps changing. Digitization expects everyone to have a smartphone with connectivity available at all times, be it to order drinks at a bar or buy tickets at a train station. A taxi driver no longer necessarily needs the intricate knowledge of a city's roads and routes that the profession once demanded, for navigation has been increasingly outsourced to a screen. Somewhere in all this development, we may be losing the incentives to keep certain human abilities active.  

We talk about lifelong learning, reskilling, agility and resilience as though human capacity is unlimited. But every pivot has a cost. Learning, uncertainty, rebuilding expertise and constantly adjusting to new expectations consume mental and physical energy. At 25, another pivot can feel like an adventure. At 40, the question may simply become, 'Is this worth another piece of my finite time and energy?'. Not because I cannot adapt, but because I now understand the cost of adaptation better.

Perhaps this is why the idea of a career also needs to evolve. After years of exploration and achievement, the next stage doesn't necessarily have to mean another acceleration. For years, whenever technology disrupted work, the answer was 'reskill'. But how many times can we reasonably expect human beings to reinvent themselves? AI could make us dramatically more productive. It could also disrupt jobs, concentrate economic power and force us to rethink the relationship between work, income, identity and purpose. Perhaps the real promise of AI should not be that humans can do more, but that technology can finally give us the freedom to decide what is worth doing. 

Maybe answering this is the responsibility of my generation, now moving into its 40s. We remember the analog world, but understand the digital one. We have experienced scarcity as well as abundance, friction as well as convenience, and expertise as well as information overload. We are, in many ways, a bridge generation, and perhaps our challenge is not to become infinitely adaptable, but to decide what deserves to change, what deserves to remain, and what humans should no longer be expected to absorb simply because they have proved capable of doing so before.

My generation has gone from floppy disks to AirDrop, from love notes to Tinder dates, and has lived through economic liberalisation and rapid growth, financial crises and recessions, globalisation and social media, climate concerns and political correctness, a global pandemic, geopolitical tensions and conflicts, and now the arrival of AI. There is little doubt that we have both the ability and appetite to adapt, but the question to ask is, “What is worth adapting for?”

Humans are not systems that need to be continuously upgraded. Sometimes, we simply need the space and time to live with the version of ourselves we have already become.