Once upon a time, everyone -- not just irate Soviet dictators and worried undergraduates -- had a Five Year Plan. This was a magical time of skinny ties and jazzercise. And the belief that anyone could calibrate his or her future with precise, well-laid long-term plans. Maybe your Five was really a Five-Years-and-Seven-Months-Starting-Next-September Plan, but it was still a variation on a universal thought process:
"I'd like to be somewhere else. I have a clear idea of where that place is. I've made out a list of the dozen specific steps I can take to get there. Now, if you'll excuse me, brain, I need to purchase a Walkman and several pastel blazers."
And so it went. Men and women with broad shoulder padding would thumb through their day planners and get to it. We were a nation of Johns and Janes Q. Greenpastures. Inveterate goal setters. Everyone saw clearly his or her far-off horizon, and the only devil was in the particulars. It was an era of relative company stability, regular promotion, leisurely technological development, narrower professional tunnels, retirement at retirement age, an international Nash equilibrium, analog communications, and an emerging Baby Boomer notion of entitlement that included not just owning the future but knowing it.
So what the hell happened?
Well, it's not that we've lost our ambitions. Nor our work ethic. Nor even our blinders. We still set goals. It is, after all, as woven into our national DNA as corporate malfeasance and NASCAR. Turn on the television - go ahead, I'll wait. Now go about 20 minutes ("Wait...for...it"). How many Charles Schwab and Prudential and RBS planning commercials aired? A dozen? More? We still worry incessantly about what the future holds, ensuring we have what we need when we get there.
But if our desire to plan persists, our systems for doing so haven't. The world evolved. We've gone from analog to digital, Almanac to Wikipedia. Nothing stays the same for more than a few double clicks. And it's this fundamental adjustment in how we conduct our daily lives, NOT a sea change in the big picture that has rendered impotent the Five Year Plan.
The Big Things -- love, family, security -- are and will always be our prime triggers. And everything else that colored our rigorous past planning -- ego, competitiveness, and need for control -- is as gigantic as ever. Media and advertising have never slowed in bombarding the American Every Worrier with images screaming that there are bigger and better things out there. Sure the accompanying messages are mixed. [Just spend. (Or save!) Just be cautious. (Or take chances!)] But for the consumer contentedness is perpetually the just-short-of impossible dream.
What's changed is our tolerance for time. Yesterday's big planners prized patience. Life was a long, incremental slog. You'd wind up far better off than your parents, certainly, but it'd happen when you looked like them. Then everything accelerated. We no longer have patience for patience. It's become the domain of the stooge. Nothing should be five years out of reach. Who has five hours, man? Our gratification ought to be instantaneous and if it isn't, we'll modify our goals accordingly. It's a run-and-gun world where the "if at first you don't succeed." message has been absorbed and amplified. Want wealth: throw a thousand ideas against wall, see what sticks. When nothing does ... throw another couple thousand. Why slog when everything about us is, if not improvable, one disposable fact?
It was once about keeping heads above water. Now it's about being water -- fluid, ebbing, flowing, taking on shape and color of circumstances, at once connected with everyone and detached from everything.
The people who look ahead are less concerned with direction than motion.
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