The fear of being irrelevant
The biggest fear in my life…..
The world is moving constantly. The way we do things is changing constantly and there are rarely any things which are the same as they were 5 years back. Human behaviors change, technology is changing constantly, and with all this change, there is a huge risk of being outdated and succumbing to the generation gap. Being a part of the software industry, the industry which changes fastest, this risk is the greatest. Who could have dreamt 10 years back, that we could be ordering groceries sitting at home and get them delivered within 30 minutes? But, this is the reality today. Everything is in our hands and is just a few clicks away: cabs, food, groceries, movie tickets. new technologies are changing the way we operate and the world is never going to be the same again in the coming 10 years too.
With the advent of blockchain, there is a completely new perspective to various things that operate in our industry currently. We were used to centralized authorities controlling our transactions and storing our money for us, but we are moving away to a completely decentralized setup where there is no central authority. Democracy has finally found its way into technology too. Whatever may be the fate of cryptocurrency, blockchain is sure to stay forever. Technology is changing everything. Self-driving cars are a reality now. We have already started with commercial trips to space with people coming back safely after their flight.
All these developments, make it necessary to grow. Being in a job as a software developer, working on some projects, I don’t wanna get lost and become outdated, unknowing of the new technologies coming in. The skills required for development are changing with new languages and frameworks being launched everywhere. I believe development in Java is going to become obsolete, the way telegrams ended in the coming 10–15 years. I am still astonished when I see some companies still using extremely old technologies like .Net.
It has become extremely important to keep a vision of the future because just doing normal work every day will never be enough. Along with technology, even we are changing the way we spend our time and entertain ourselves. Who thought that, after visual communications and video entertainment made possible, people would still love to listen just audio in a form of podcasts and even interact with people on platforms like Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces. Even the most intimate relationships, like dating, are now being done through platforms like Tinder and Bumble.
But, with all these happenings, one major factor to consider is that there are certain things that have not even changed a bit. The way people were hired and the way they are hired today, are exactly the same. The candidates are still judged on their aptitude. The major reason for it is basically that learning new things is extremely easy for a smart person and there are a million new technologies and the companies are usually looking out for an all-rounder, rather than an expert.
There are many people around me, who are older than me and are in the technology industry but have no idea about even how a Linux system works but are performing well on their jobs. But, I constantly have this fear to not be like them and end up having half-knowledge of the things I am doing and no idea about where the world is headed.
Nature itself is changing, with new viruses attacking our generations, new kinds of weapons coming into existence and the climate change disaster looming over all of our heads. In the coming years, some places around the world will become completely uninhabitable. Complete nations could sync and a new age migration would be triggered. So, not only our skills, but even survival is not a sure thing.
I wrote this article, just to help all of you reading this retrospect, which has become impossible for most of us in our daily lives. The everyday struggle for survival and having a better life every day, makes us look at a smaller picture that we ignore the big picture completely. We work for more money, a better lifestyle, and compromising everything else. We get so busy doing such things, that we forget why we already started. I bet most of us won’t be able to answer a simple question — what would you do if you were a millionaire or billionaire? Sure, it is easy to talk about the things which you will buy, but what after that. There is still a big chunk of your life remaining. Will you just stop working and sit at home watching TV, passing time? We all might be motivated by earning loads of money, but we don’t know do we really want that? I realized, to be successful at anything, there should be no other reason than actually just doing it because it then leads to disappointments. But, there are really few things which we do just for doing. Rather, we lay pros and cons trying to take a sensible decision.
Playing it safe and just going with the flow, I believe, is the easiest way of being irrelevant. It is important to grow, just for the sake of growing, and nothing else. The world is big enough to make anything obsolete quickly but small enough to make something a trend within a day.
