People don't want to look back at - how far we came in each decade - how brilliant people had to be to invent ideas that feel obvious to us - how much people

People don't want to look back at - how far we came in each decade - how brilliant people had to be to invent ideas that feel obvious to us - how much people got done with previous decades' technology - how many times history the consensus of expert opinion mis-predicted the next development because we want to believe - the current state of the art is close to perfection than it is to the last generation - we only have to embrace the obvious - people who are one step behind the times are at an insurmountable disadvantage to us who are up-to-date - the future will bring nothing more than a higher perfection of the ideas we embrace now It's intellectual millennialism. We want to think that the new ideas we receive at the beginning of our career are the final piece of the puzzle, that there's no point in generations beyond us. Our ideas give us special powers to accomplish things that no previous generation could accomplish, and no subsequent generation will accomplish much more, or the same things much easier, than we did. We are standing at the end of history. We are the generation that left the desert and entered the promised land. History upsets all that. History teaches us that the future will stand in relation to us as we stand in relation to the past, whereas we want to believe that we are equals with the future and superior to the past.