It should be no surprise that religion in the non-western world has failed to disappear under the juggernaut of industrial capitalism, or that liberal democracy finds its most dedicated saboteurs among the new middle classes.
When I was younger, 15 years or 20 years seemed like a really long time. But, as you journey though life, you don’t realise where the years disappear.
Every time a bit of information is erased, we know it doesn’t disappear. It goes out into the environment. It may be horribly scrambled and confused, but it never really gets lost. It’s just converted into a different form.
Twice a week, a truck comes near my house, and two guys get out and pick up the garbage. This will disappear. There will still be a truck coming, but it will be driven autonomously, and the garbage will be picked up autonomously, and those jobs will be gone.
I knew David Lynch going to television was going to be something. It was either going to not work, nobody was going to get it and it would disappear, or it was going to be something special and really stand out.
We derive so much of our self-confidence and validation from Instagram. Just imagine one day Instagram gets deleted like all of your friends who you think you have on social media, all these likes and comments just disappear, what are we left with? We have stopped valuing human relationships and contact.
The brutalities of a fight with bare hands, the crushed nasal bones, maimed lips, and other disfigurements, which call for the utter abolition of boxing in the interests of humanity, at once disappear when the contestants cover their hands with large, soft-leather gloves.
On the surface, rock and roll changes at an amazing pace. The influence of a figure like the Maharishi can appear and disappear in a matter of months. Talk about old fashioned rock and roll finds itself dead before it begins.
The impact of Brexit is likely to be slow and incremental, hardly the sudden transformation that some Leave voters wanted. Immigrants will not disappear, and manufacturing will not immediately return to northern-English cities – quite the contrary.
Economies typically do not function well in hyperinflation. The real value of government debt might disappear, but the economy is likely to disappear with it.
Put your goals on paper, or an Excel spreadsheet. Measure every day, ‘Did I do my best to…?’ Your problems won’t disappear, but you will exist in a different relation to them, and you will improve.
A trend is exactly that, and it’s going to disappear.
