Too Much Change

Change can cause a crisis, as when it enables nefarious forces to expand their range of activities or when it challenges an individual’s identity and creates an inability to adapt. In the current era, change is causing confusion, anxiety and uncertainty because it seems to be happening everywhere and all at once – that is, there is a perception that society is enduring Too Much Change and it is happening too fast. The tensions have given rise to new levels of alienation, individual mental stress and workplace anxiety. Is this a new reality, or is it something that can be controlled and slowed? Change, which once seemed to signal advances in society’s development, has started to be seen more like a disruption, something that threatens one’s future more than makes the future better.

Changes now seem to require more training, more education, more time and more effort to keep abreast of them and for society to keep moving forward. Human beings are responding in three ways: by accepting the changes as good; by protesting, often violently, against them; or by narrowing their focus to areas over which they have control and lowering the level of conflict they encounter.