People felt a loss of control due to accelerated change in America over the past 10 years: changes in retail (cashiers without baseball hats), bathroom/gender norms, workplace automation (robots being introduced into offices), and social norms all disrupted people's sense of home, work, and normalcy simultaneously.
causalpending
Speaker
Tom FriedmanEvidence Quote
“there is a sense of a lot of people of a loss of control um and uh you know we've gone through just such accelerated change in America um you know sometime in the last uh 10 years um people went to the grocery store and the the person at the cash register wasn't wearing a baseball hat um uh they went into the men's room and they saw someone of a different gender um and then they went to the office and their boss rolled a robot up and it seemed to be studying their job and it all happened at the same time”
Source
Thomas Friedman on the Future of America and the World: The Post-Election Dissection (Part 1)— Intelligence SquaredCreated: 8/11/2026, 7:09:18 AM
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