So much fast change is happening right now that it makes me wonder if we are losing more than we are gaining. Let me expand on this idea a little.

I recently watched an episode of Legacy List, a PBS program that delves into American history through family objects. I’ve only watched this program a few times but it seems to me that the usual unfolding of each episode involves the death of a family elder and the subsequent sorting of their belongings in a way that strives to honor that person’s life and contributions to the family stories and happenings.

I am a person that values old objects. I like to imagine the effort that went into making or buying the object. And I like to imagine the life that went with the object: the technologies, the habits, the goals, the dreams and hopes of the people that acquired the object. Many ways of knowing and doing are lost in the past everyday. Farming ways have mostly been lost, for example. Most people don’t know how to grow food or drain land so that it keeps its topsoil, or deliver a calf that is being born, or even ride a horse or use one to move a fallen tree.

On Legacy List, the family descendants are often coping with feelings of being overwhelmed by the objects of their ancestors. They have to get rid of a lot of the objects and they want help finding their family’s stories as expressed by what is left behind when their family member dies. This clearly shows that the pace of change is so fast that objects fall out of use regularly. I wonder if it also shows how much public policies that affect the economy have undermined family wealth continuity. In earlier times, people preserved the past more. The pace of change was slower. They inherited objects that still had a use in the present and future.

In a book I’m reading called The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr, I’m reading that the way that people take in their information nowadays can fracture our ability to think up new ideas. I wonder if a scattering of our ability to concentrate might harm our ability to plan and assemble new objects that could shape a new future that we will value. Will people of the future want to make up their own lives creatively or will they rely on computer technologies to do it for them? And will the legacy of that be worth trying to save in the same way that the families of Legacy List try to preserve their own family objects and stories?

I keep hearing that kids graduating from our public schools lack skills to do arithmetic or read for comprehension. I worry that their use of computers has damaged their ability to internalize knowledge that they can carry with them wherever they go and use for their own purposes and plans.

I have a library filled with books that are now from an obviously different era with different ways of thinking and doing things. I regret that those ways of thinking and doing are dying so fast. And those ways of thinking and doing seem to have no defense against the modern onslaught of fast changes.

This fast change may be wasteful.

It may be unwise.

What do you value in your own life and how will you preserve it so that it has value for the next generations? Is there a way for you to do that? How can you keep your brain engaged so that you can think creatively and deeply as much as the human legacy shows that we have done in the past?

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