The most important invention in your lifetime is…
When I compare life now with my younger years, the difference is extraordinary.
As a student, research was slow, local, and uncertain. You spent hours in the library working through abstracts, hoping you were even looking in the right place, and then hoping again that your library actually carried the journal you needed. The search was painstaking, and the outcome was never guaranteed.
Now the bottleneck has shifted. Information is rarely the problem. Access is rarely the problem. Searches are instant. Databases are global. The article you need can appear in minutes, not days—and it can happen from a desk, a train, a café, or the other side of the world.
That’s the real change: knowledge has been untethered from place.
The computer revolution has been extraordinary, but if I had to name one invention that captures the shift, it would be Wi-Fi. Not because it made computers clever, but because it made learning portable. It took research out of the building and put it into ordinary life.
And once information can travel with you, it doesn’t just change how you study. It changes what you assume is possible: where work can happen, how quickly a question can be answered, how often curiosity can be satisfied, and how much of your day is spent waiting for access rather than doing the thinking.
Wi-Fi, in other words, didn’t just speed things up. It changed the shape of the world.
The Afterword 
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