There's lots of talk these days about social instability in industrialized nations. Unlike the good old days, when people had one boring job their entire life, people have several careers with several companies. And unlike those happy times in the past, when people stayed in marriages even when miserable, the divorce rate has increased about 40% in the US since the 1970s, so that about half of marriages today will end in a split.

But such social instability belies the fact that people do more in their lives today than ever before. So while the length of time people stay in one job or one marriage may be objectively decreasing, the amount of novelty and productivity they have in these shorter periods may be increasing. Hence objective measurements of time spent in any single life activity may not be appropriate. A better measurement may be subjective gauges of novelty and productivity--of new experiences and accomplishments.

Take a marriage, for example. While couples 50 years ago might have been lucky to travel to a few places in their marriage, couples today may see dozens together within a decade. Similarly, while couples 50 years ago might have exchanged hundreds of letters in their marriage, couples today can exchange that many emails in a month.

Similarly with work. As productivity increases, each employee is able to create more output per hour worked. Computers enhance our ability to creatively solve problems, while advanced industrial machinery and robotics enhance our ability to realize those solutions in physical materials. Today, the average worker can perform 40 hours of 1950s-era work in 10 hours. That means each worker today can perform 40 years worth of 1950s-era work in 10 years. So is it any surprise that people today have four or five careers in a lifetime? From the perspective of someone living in the 1950s, in those four careers they would truly equal the careers of four 1950s era workers.

All of this suggests that with the accelerating pace of technological change we might expect what appears to be increasing social instability, but what may in fact simply be subjective time compression.