It’s like déjà vu all over again. ~Yogi Berra
Yep. That’s me in my fabulous Nehru tux getting ready for my prom date. I was about as spiffy then as spiffy could be. The tux was rented, but I had my regular Nehrus in the closet. They were next to my bell-bottoms, tie-dyes and 8-tracks.
What happened?
The Nehru went out of style around 11:55 p.m. the night of the prom and I had to hang on to my bell-bottoms and tie-dyes for about 30 years for them to come back around into fashion. The 8-tracks? They gave way to those newfangled cassettes.
How could I have been so wrong about the future of Nehrus and 8-tracks? Actually, when I think about it, I was wrong about a lot of things: The Afro perm I thought would look spectacular on me forever, the Beatles never breaking up, my best friend Kevin and I being pals for life, the Osborn 55-pound “portable” computer, and the 8-track tape player (which cost me a week’s salary) I had installed in my car. Naturally I thought my prom date would never change.
But in spite of my convictions at the time I was about as wrong as wrong could be. The good news is I am not alone.
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I think I’m an outlier, because I actually believe that I have very little idea where my life will be in a year. I base this on the fact that even right now things are nowhere like what I would have tried to predict a year ago, and a year ago nothing was like what I would have tried to predict two years ago. So I’ve stopped predicting. I think these rapid changes are fueled by access to the Web. Change seemed much slower before the 1990s.
While the article is cute and funny, the bottom line really seems to be that we can’t predict the future! I can’t really think of any time in my life when I’ve wanted things to stay as they were-maybe I’m different from most, but I mainly just hoped things would improve and I didn’t really care that much how.