Back in 1970, Alvin Toffler wrote Future Shock, where he introduced the idea that too much rapid change could leave people feeling overwhelmed, stressed, and disconnected. He called it “future shock” — and honestly, reading it today feels almost eerie with how accurate he was.
Toffler believed we were moving from an industrial society to a “super-industrial” one, where everything would change faster than people could handle. The book was a huge hit at the time, selling over six million copies, but what’s crazy is how much of what he talked about feels even more true in 2025. Some examples:
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Disposable culture: He predicted throwaway products, and now we have single-use plastics, fast fashion, and gadgets that feel obsolete within a year.
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Tech burnout: Toffler said technology would become outdated faster and faster. Today, if you don’t upgrade your phone or update your software, you feel left behind.
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Rent instead of own: Services like Airbnb and Uber fit his prediction that we’d move away from owning things and toward renting everything.
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Job instability: He nailed the rise of the gig economy, freelancing, and how fast-changing industries make it hard to stay trained up and secure.
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Transient relationships: He warned about shallow, fleeting social connections — something social media, dating apps, and global mobility have absolutely amplified.
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Information overload: This term literally came from Future Shock, and if you’ve ever felt exhausted just from scrolling through your feeds or reading the news, you know exactly what he meant.
Toffler also talked about the “death of permanence” — not just products, but relationships, jobs, even identities becoming temporary and interchangeable. He warned it would cause “shattering stress and disorientation.” Looking around at the rising rates of anxiety, depression, and burnout today, it’s hard not to see what he meant.
I think about this book a lot when I read about some of the sick things happening today. Is this a warped perspective?
I’ll never forgive OpenAI for making the unordered list a reason to complain about content.
I think the comment you are replying to is not about the unordered list — but your use of em dash.
See the above sentence for an example
There are dozens of us that know how to type en- and em-dashes! Dozens I say!
I mean, I see the point, but chat GPT got it from somewhere. That somewhere being people writing like that.
I think that the use of em-dashes specifically is a result of either the preprocessing of the training data or postprocessing of the generated text. I doubt that the material the models are trained on (i.e. Reddit) contains more em-dashes that hyphens in the position of sentence breaks.
But it definitely gets the use of dash as sentence break from people writing like that. If you ask ChatGPT in another language, whose users don’t generally use dashes, e.g. Slovak, it won’t use then as much.
If I had to guess, I’d say it’s not necessarily baked into the models, but rather part of a style guide in the system prompt
I didn’t see you at the – convention in Munich last year…
Its so weird to me that some people don’t even know what the hell an en or em dash is. In Spanish we use them to express dialogue in books so everybody has at least heard of it
Probably just that. As an ESL, I never encountered or taught about em dash. I would use semicolons they way OP uses those weid longer dashes. Probably the em dash is better / more “proper” way.