What is reverse nostalgia?

A mental illness perhaps where the patient longs for the future to come sooner. Many suffer from it unwittingly, or at least hold their tongue for fear of standing out. Many become sci-fi, fantasy or fiction writers, revealing possibilities we never knew existed and never expect will come true.

Some fear the future, because the present is lucrative, certain, within their control. It's hard to let go of what you have and risk the unknown, even if it's better for most. None are immune from thinking this way, but we may be negligent culprits in our own right.

The future is already here. You can't stop it, you can't prolong the present, nothing is ever certain. This isn't doomsday thinking, it's what we choose not to see because we're passing through it, like the air around us.

Very few are building that future our forefathers have given us the stepping stones for. All the philosophy, culture, medicine, technology, engineering, behavior is just enough so we can exist with each other and take the next step forward.

Whether electric cars, biofuels, stem cells, or artificial intelligence doesn't matter. Once the idea, and more importantly the execution to make the idea possible, exist, there's no stopping the eventuality that we will see it sooner or later. As Vinod Khosla says, "Everything that's possible eventually happens." Accepting, rather than fearing what's to come, moves the dial along that much quicker.

Reverse nostalgia is in us all. The only way to get rid of it is to build that tomorrow we long for.

Thinking like a librarian

Librarians are curators. You ask them a question and they find you the best possible resources to reach an answer, often redefining the original question itself. They're not consultants, analysts, managers, decision-makers, engineers, logisticians, or artists. Their drive is to accumulate large volumes of information and categorize it effectively so it may be referenced at any time. Prior to Google or Wikipedia, they were the search engines.

And they are far from obsolete. In fact, librarian thinking is an incredibly necessary skill set when, everyday, we query search engines for answers to both mundane and extremely complex questions. How we search may have changed, but what we search for is still mostly the same.

"How do I...?"
"What is...?"
"Directions to..."
"Places to visit in..."
"Best..."

"Cheapest..."

We want quality answers quickly, but the #1 result may not be it. How do we know? What judgment skills do we use to evaluate whether the "best restaurant in Santa Fe is ___" or if "easiest way to hard boil eggs is ___" The answer doesn't matter, but the way you evaluate the answer does.

The essence of librarian thinking is curation. How would a librarian conduct a Google search? They would start by looking for something, get some answers, review those answers, ask the question in a different way, narrow down the answers, rate the answers, research each answer to qualify it, review the original question and see if the final answer is accurate. This process only skims the surface of what a librarian might do.

There are technical features that make the search process much more specific. The use of operators is one example. Using +, -, and, or, quotes, ~, and *, adds a level of specificity to your search. Using allin operators lets you manipulate your searches further by restricting where exactly Google will search for the word or phrase you entered.

These are tools, though, that are readily available for anyone to use. The key to librarian thinking is in the prefix, "re-": re-defining, re-searching, re-organizing, re-versing, re-evaluating, etc. It's not one step, but many. Much like the metaphor of peeling back the layers of an onion, librarians have a multi-layered approach to their searches.

The importance of a librarian's knowledge, experience and thinking can only grow as the volume of information available to us grows. We must all learn the basics of these skills to decipher, judge and better evaluate the answers we receive. We make medical, legal, business, and general life decisions based on these answers. Librarian thinking is a skill that will be invaluable in developing our foundational reasoning in the generations to come.