Things are coming so much faster now.

Writing has been around for thousands of years. But it caught on extremely slowly. It took thousands of years to spread across the globe. For thousands of years being literate was rare. The printing press changed things a lot, but books and the education needed to use them remained uncommon. Until pretty recently, a person’s daily life looked a lot like their grandparents’ did.

Things started picking up. Electricity went from zero to ubiquitous in a few generations. So did mechanized transport, radio, TV, and telephones.

It’s faster than that today. Most people today communicate using systems that didn’t exist at all when I was a child. At work, we’re all using tools that didn’t exist just a few years ago.

The “check back in a few centuries” doesn’t work, because we’re not going to be using the same stuff in a few centuries. We’re probably not going to be using the same stuff in a few decades. We didn’t have time to figure out the ramifications of doomscrolling before it became ubiquitous, and we’ll probably have even less time to figure out the next thing.