Thank you for being late

After listening to this audiobook, I felt more caught up on my understanding of how technology is affecting society. I’m a compulsive learner, and lately I’ve been working on transitioning from thinking of myself as an overgrown college student to trying to take myself seriously as a professional adult. In this book he makes a strong case that lifelong learning is a part of our societal reality. The basic tools we work with are changing rapidly. I just took an online class to refresh my excel skills. This book helped me frame that as part of continuing education, rather than as a regression back to school. It also helped me frame the actual current threats better: namely terrorism and hacking. I started listening because of the title. I’ve been having problems with people being late and/or flakey. It didn’t really address that issue beyond „people are so busy these days!“ And the subtitle promised optimism. I guess it was somewhat optismistic? Kind of? I’d say it’s more like „golly gee, what a world!“ And there was a LOT of pining for the old days. In the end it wasn’t what it said it was. And it felt overlong, repetitive, and boring. I think I could have absorbed the same information in a tenth of the time. I know a lot of people are big fans of this author, maybe they’d find his long, detailed memoir style ramblings more interesting than I did. I kept thinking he was going to make a point. Why did I finish it? It started strong and I hoped it would end strong after I got past the fluff. Nope.

Perhaps I'm not the target audience for this book. Although I'm unsure which audience would be ok with it either. If you're someone who keeps an ear to the ground in science and tech news, nothing in this book is new to you. If that's the case you'll be cringing everytime the author tells you you've never heard of Qualcomm or Github or uses the term Supernova when he's talking about the cloud where he really just means the Internet.

Aslo, it seems like getting to the point is a bit difficult - the book could have been a third of the size and gave you all the same information. The information in it however is interesting of course. It does talk about many important factors of our modern life, but I don't see it adding to the conversation at all. It's fine to discuss common knowledge if you have an interesting take on it, but name dropping all the places you've been and people you've met just isn't that profound.