Become a founder.
In his sixties, American historian and novelist Henry Adams began to write his autobiography.[1] He had been born in 1838 into a family that included two presidents.[2] He graduated from Harvard, joined his father as a diplomatic secretary in London during the US Civil War, traveled widely, taught history at his alma mater, edited a prestigious magazine, and published thousands of pages of writing.[3] These accomplishments paled in comparison to what Adams sought all his life and never found: an education that would prepare him for the explosive technological growth of the twentieth century. He reflected in his autobiography:
Men who knew nothing whatever—who had never run a steam-engine, the simplest of forces—who had never put their hands on a lever—had never touched an electric battery—never talked through a telephone, and had not the shadow of a notion what amount of force was meant by a watt or an ampère or an erg, or any other term of measurement introduced within a hundred years—had no choice but to sit down on the steps and brood as they had never brooded on the benches of Harvard College, either as student or professor, aghast at what they had said and done in all these years, and still more ashamed of the childlike ignorance and babbling futility of the society that let them say and do it.[4]
The elites Adams trusted were just as unprepared as the commoners for the technological transformation of society. If these gatekeepers had some proprietary knowledge unknown to the masses, they had not passed those insights on to Adams. He followed the expectations of his betters and concluded that doing so impaired him for the machine age.[5]
We might call this the Henry Adams Problem: a special kind of hell in which one plays an entirely new game by old rules and does not discover their error until they have already lost. It is the turmoil we experience when technological shocks teach us the world is not static.
The Henry Adams Problem is a consequence of dynamism and relevant to every progressing society. Its story of technological change does not only belong to Adams, it is our story too.
For one, there is the practical challenge of making a living. We train ourselves for existing professions expecting them to be as valuable in the future as they are now. This is a precarious assumption, and it can have us rooting for the world to remain stagnant just long enough to finish out our careers without major upheaval. But the Henry Adams Problem is much deeper than a frustrated job search.
brooded on the benches of Harvard College
aghast at what they had said and done
ashamed of the childlike ignorance and babbling futility of the society that let them say and do it
These are not the words of someone lamenting their career prospects. Rather, we sense regrets that no achievement can soothe. Oblivious to the forces governing my times, have all my efforts been meaningless and irrelevant? Have I been left behind?
At its core, the Henry Adams Problem is an existential crisis.
In Adams’s case, the Boston Brahmin could have shielded him from career ups and downs. If needed, he could have fallen back on family money and connections. But none of these safeguards protected him from feeling that, despite striving for significance, he still ended up obsolete.
Adams was a full two centuries behind. Reflecting on his education, he asked:
What could become of such a child of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when he should wake up to find himself required to play the game of the twentieth?[6]
Adams was reared in the 1800s and yet his reference point for himself and society stretched back to the 1600s. He was groomed for colonial America, a period when thinkers versed in philosophy and literature shaped the nation’s destiny. But the shift from humanities thinkers to engineering tinkerers between the First and Second Industrial Revolutions left Adams feeling intellectually homeless. Perhaps he tricked himself into believing that the frontiers were in the same place they were two hundred years ago.
Adams’s own solution to the Henry Adams Problem was to voraciously read up on the sciences. Doing so expanded his vision of the cosmos. But his efforts were discouraging. He felt he was playing catch-up and doomed to always be behind, that he was merely spectating on the future.
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What worked for one generation is what it will teach to the next. But old lessons will not function for a new generation without modifications. If we only educate ourselves on what already exists, we will become obsolete. If we want to be future-proof, we may need to learn about what does not yet exist, and the only way to learn about what does not exist is to create something new.
The solution to the Henry Adams Problem is to become a founder.
We must figure out the Henry Adams Problem for ourselves by asking where the frontiers are and to be aware that frontiers move. Innovators look as if they are prepared for the future, but they are not prepared for the future, they create the future.
Put yourself close to the frontier. Put yourself in the arena. Whoever you are, the future needs you.
Notes
AI-generated artwork from Microsoft Bing, powered by DALL-E 3, November 4, 2023.
[1] After writing his autobiography between 1903 and 1906, Adams printed and circulated it privately among his inner circle of friends in 1907. In 1918, Adams died at eighty years old, and his book was published posthumously that same year. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, ed. Ira B. Nadel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), ProQuest, xiv, xxvii.
[2] Ira B. Nadel, introduction to The Education of Henry Adams, by Henry Adams, ed. Ira B. Nadel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), ProQuest, vii.
[3] T. J. Jackson Lears, “In Defense of Henry Adams,” Wilson Quarterly 7, no. 4 (Autumn 1983): 82.
[4] Adams, Education, 287.
[5] Readers then and now push back on Adams’s narrative of displacement. Historian T. J. Jackson Lears comments that the Boston Brahmin, a social network of influential, high-class families in the Boston area of which the Adams family was a part, adapted to the industrialization of America without losing their social and economic positions. Lears, “In Defense of Henry Adams,” 82–84.
[6] Adams, Education, 9.