By Russell C. Smith and Michael Foster
Look around. We are all now makers, creators, and the people who will decide the future of the world. Remaking, renewing, and reinventing are propelling us forward. Looking to the future and the past, we ask ourselves what really matters. And we’re each building our own answers from the ground up.
As we’re pulled deeper into the century stretching out before us, we are heading into an uncharted land of transformative experiences at a time of challenge, renewal, and reinvention. The experiential nature of life is deepening and altering everyone on the planet. What it means to be human, to be experiencing life — is being reinvented at an accelerated pace. There’s a rebirth of creation and making things, as well as the tearing down of old social systems. No place has been untouched, and everyone has a say. We are saying it in larger numbers every day, and we are saying it with strength and unity and individuality. Amidst the chaos and destruction, flowers are in bloom.
The interconnectivity devices have been fully deployed, and transformative technological leaps have promised to make us newer, shinier versions of ourselves. People in technology and media have claimed this era as The Digital Age, but a more appropriate name for the times we’re living through is the Age of Reinvention.
In the Age of Reinvention whole societies and individual lives are being re-envisioned, reworked, restructured, rebooted, and rebuilt. As our cities and societies crumble, new ways of living and interacting are waiting in the wings, ready to be switched on. Time and space will be overcome and readjusted to reflect our new minds, and we’ll continue to adapt to the recurring tsunamis of environmental, societal, cultural, and global disasters and challenges.
We are living in a time when being stuck in the past is a form of death. Without hesitating and without giving in to fear or willful ignorance, we’re remaking how we interact with each other and with tech, art, work, relationships, culture, video, writing, love, architecture, violence, social systems, our cities, our bodies, our food and water sources, our modes of communication.
Being alive now is unlike being alive in earlier, unconnected centuries. The eco-system of the planet is speaking to each of us. Technology is morphing and mutating each of us. The creative DNA deep within each of us has been activated. We’ve opened not only digital doorways with our minds, but dormant survival systems that have been waiting to awaken. We’re more connected and less willing to have systems and structures imposed upon us than we’ve ever been. Outmoded laws based upon archaic belief systems are being gotten rid of, and the new now supports and believes in more social acceptance for all.
With economic and technological disruption have come freedom, creativity, and chaos. People can experience all of the effects of these three states of mind in one day or in one hour of their lives. Adaptation is imperative. Making personal changes centered around creativity, chaos, and freedom have become a universal imperative. Choosing our own essential imperative is included in digital interaction. Freedom, chaos, and creativity have leapt off the screen and live on city streets and mountaintops.
In the Age of Reinvention people have become more of who they were meant to be. There’s no hiding and there’s no reason to waste time. Time has always been the great leveler, and now it is both the most important thing on Earth, and the most expansive and expensive thing around. Time turns on a dime and is worth billions. Time is a renewable commodity carried around in invisible luggage. Time is what’s closest to our hearts and the center of our being. Time can be an open door to forever when you’re in a flow state, or it can be a rock crushing your spirit when you’re a bundle of suffering. It’s time for each of us to take back our internal clocks and redefine the meaning of time in our lives.
Information surrounds us, chases after us, and forces us to be more intelligent curators of our own minds/lives. The days of blindly ingesting and believing everything corporations, media, governments, and leaders of every type are over. Trust is conditional, and information isn’t knowledge. In same way a generation grew up knowing only a world with TV in it, now new generations will never have known a time when the Internet, smartphones, tablets, global climate change, clones, drones, robots, and constant connectivity didn’t exist. Buckminster Fuller’s Spaceship Earth and Marshall McLuhan’s Global Village have become real place — not in a faraway future, but in the early days of the twenty-first century.
In the Age of Reinvention real human interaction is primary. Connectivity and community may begin online, but people are hardwired to read faces, communicate ideas, collaborate on projects, and make significant and lasting changes together. The Age of Reinvention has begun, and the new now has connected people everywhere on the planet. What we do with this time is up to each of us.
