"We must learn to balance the material wonders of technology with the spiritual demands of our human race"
About this Quote
A futurist’s warning dressed up as management advice, Naisbitt’s line flatters the reader’s modern faith in gadgets while quietly questioning it. “Material wonders” is deliberately seductive phrasing: technology isn’t framed as a threat, but as a kind of candy-store miracle. That choice matters because it disarms the usual anti-tech backlash. He’s not asking us to smash machines; he’s asking us to notice what the machines can’t supply.
The real pressure point is “balance,” a word that sounds reasonable and bloodless until you consider what it implies: we’re already out of balance, and the default setting of modern life is to overinvest in what can be measured, optimized, and sold. Coming from a businessman best known for trend-spotting, the sentence reads less like a sermon than a market diagnosis: productivity gains and constant connectivity create a cultural deficit elsewhere - in meaning, community, interior life, even the ability to be alone without input.
“Spiritual demands” is the clever hinge. He doesn’t say “religion,” which would narrow the audience and trigger culture-war reflexes. “Spiritual” is elastic: purpose, ethics, awe, belonging, restraint. It’s also a subtle rebuke to the corporate habit of treating humans as upgradeable components. The phrase “our human race” sounds slightly formal, even archaic, as if to remind a late-20th-century audience (Naisbitt wrote amid the computer revolution) that progress isn’t just faster systems; it’s whether those systems leave people more whole.
The intent isn’t to slow innovation. It’s to force a harder question: what kind of people are we becoming while we celebrate what we’re building?
The real pressure point is “balance,” a word that sounds reasonable and bloodless until you consider what it implies: we’re already out of balance, and the default setting of modern life is to overinvest in what can be measured, optimized, and sold. Coming from a businessman best known for trend-spotting, the sentence reads less like a sermon than a market diagnosis: productivity gains and constant connectivity create a cultural deficit elsewhere - in meaning, community, interior life, even the ability to be alone without input.
“Spiritual demands” is the clever hinge. He doesn’t say “religion,” which would narrow the audience and trigger culture-war reflexes. “Spiritual” is elastic: purpose, ethics, awe, belonging, restraint. It’s also a subtle rebuke to the corporate habit of treating humans as upgradeable components. The phrase “our human race” sounds slightly formal, even archaic, as if to remind a late-20th-century audience (Naisbitt wrote amid the computer revolution) that progress isn’t just faster systems; it’s whether those systems leave people more whole.
The intent isn’t to slow innovation. It’s to force a harder question: what kind of people are we becoming while we celebrate what we’re building?
Quote Details
| Topic | Technology |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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