[Radim]

You're just too old to understand! :-)

“When I was a boy of 18, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 30, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in just twelve years.” *

There is real change, and having experienced its evolution first hand – the stumbling path, wrong turns, compromises and victories – does have value. Beyond merely acknowledging the distance between {start, end} states.

One of my regrets is I didn't query my grandparents more about their pre-WW2 and WW2 experience while they were still around. The way societies (and companies) breathe and evolve is hard to reconstruct from just books and official records & ex-post propaganda. Our lives are too short to internalize multi-decade patterns.

* Ages adjusted from 14 and 21 respectively, to account for maturity inflation since Mark Twain.