Even knowledge has to be in the fashion... Thought and taste change with the times. Do not be old-fashioned in your ways of thinking, and let your taste be in the modern style... But this rule does not apply to kindness, for goodness is for all time... If you are wise, live as you can, if you cannot live as you would.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
The most reluctant maxim in the book: you can hear the reluctance in it. The times are partly wrong, virtue is out of fashion, and still his counsel is to fit the age, because living against the grain of your era on matters of style and method is a tax paid daily for no revenue. The exemption clause carries the ethics: goodness is for all time; kindness, honesty, and your word are exempt from fashion. Everything else, tools, formats, tastes, manners of working, updates with the season. Live as you can when you cannot live as you would: adapt the machinery, keep the cargo, and save your resistance for the few things actually worth resisting about your age.
Practice
- Separate cargo from machinery yearly: values and standards in the first list, tools and formats in the second; update the second without ceremony.
- Adopt the age's instruments before they become remedial: the payment system, the platform, the format your juniors already breathe.
- Ration your era-complaints to the ones you act on; narrating the age's decline is the leading symptom of being priced out of it (maxim 20 found the exchange rate).
Use this when
- Use this at the technology thresholds where a season's stubbornness becomes a decade's obsolescence.
- Use it on taste in your outputs: the report, the storefront, the material formatted for how the age actually reads (maxim 87's interfaces, kept current).
Ignore this when
- Don't update the exempt list; the moment kindness or honesty is treated as machinery, this maxim has been misread into surrender.
- Don't chase every fashion either; fit the age, not every quarter of it; the update cycle is seasons, not weeks.
A picture of it
Of the market's two old jewellers, both third-generation, both trusted, one treated every change since 1990 as a decline to be narrated: cards, then hallmarking portals, then the payment apps, each adopted years late, under protest, after the customers it cost. The other updated the machinery each season without comment, and defended exactly two things as non-negotiable: the purity his grandfather's name was built on and the buyback promise. The young buy from him and inherit the habit. Both men kept the faith. Only one understood which parts of it the age was allowed to touch.
Update the machinery every season. Never the cargo. Confusing the two is how good men become either fossils or frauds.