Change keeps changing

Sometimes I sit and wonder what the world I live in now will look like in a year, five years, ten years.

This thought process runs through my mind because in my nearly thirty years here, I have seen plenty of changes. Hell, growing up we still had a 19 inch black and white TV in the living room and until the early 90s I had to physically get up from my seat and change the channel. Little did I know that before the end of that very decade I would be in charge of running a news website. Not just one aspect of it, the whole damned thing and not because I knew everything there was to know, it was because of my age. It was the one thing that someone of my age was supposed to know because the internet grew up with me.

Now I look back and realize that while I got the job done, I also completely sucked at it. Yeah, I made the company substantial piles of money but it was during the boom-time in our country.

Now I have a diminshed role more focused on what I know but it's still with websites. They've changed and everythign I do regarding them has changed as well. The world around me has changed too.

The city where I grew up recently had a fire burn down a pre-turn-of-the-century block of downtown businesses. Just blocks away, more businesses met the wrecking ball in favor of a parking lot and court house addition. Adjacent to that project, Great Depression-era bridges and underpasses were removed. The highway traffic they once served was moved to the freeway which now skirts the city in the 1960s.

The character of that city's downtown has changed so much that I don't even recognize it when I pass through.

Physical structures seem to be built to resist change while technology advances at a pace that makes some people's heads spin. Is there some middle ground that can be found to preserve the physical view of the past while making it functional for the future? Will the changes I've witnessed be dwarfed by those to come?

If existential questions like those above make your head hurt, check out the soothing yet intriguing photos at MinnPics. Great photos. Minnesota style.