When I was young, landing on the moon and the US war with Vietnam were all “in the past” and when I was young everything “in the past” had equal weighting and distance from my existence.
As I get older, I look back on things with the perspective of equidistance, time-wise, from my birth (or sometimes from ~adulthood) and events within that ever growing range start feeling like “not that long ago”
The Vietnam war ended only 3 years before I was born!
Apollo 11 was less than a decade before I was born. I’ve experienced that 9 year timespan three times in conscious memory and five times in my life.
Even WWII is closer to my birth than I am.
Heck, even the Great Depression was just starting to recover.
The older I get, the more recent everything seems.
It’s bizarre to me these days to really realize and contemplate how close events like WW2, Kennedy’s assassination, the moon landing, Woodstock, etcetera actually all were to my birth.
But as a child and even into my early 20s most of those events felt like practically an eternity away.
It really puts it into perspective when I think about the fact that I moved out of my parents’ home and started working full time over 30 years ago…
First saw the Grateful Dead in concert over 30 years ago… They’d already been performing for over 25 years at that point and seemed like such a massive juggernaut that had just sort of always been around.
when I was young everything “in the past” had equal weighting and distance from my existence.
As a young person I relate to this feeling. Sometimes I forget how close to my birth some historical events were. Like, 9/11 was just a couple years before my birth, and the end of the USSR was closer to my birth than I am (and by quite a margin). Which… to me, the USSR feels very much “in the past”.
Same idea but in, perhaps, a different sense:
When I was young, landing on the moon and the US war with Vietnam were all “in the past” and when I was young everything “in the past” had equal weighting and distance from my existence.
As I get older, I look back on things with the perspective of equidistance, time-wise, from my birth (or sometimes from ~adulthood) and events within that ever growing range start feeling like “not that long ago”
The older I get, the more recent everything seems.
I relate very much with you on this comment.
It’s bizarre to me these days to really realize and contemplate how close events like WW2, Kennedy’s assassination, the moon landing, Woodstock, etcetera actually all were to my birth.
But as a child and even into my early 20s most of those events felt like practically an eternity away.
It really puts it into perspective when I think about the fact that I moved out of my parents’ home and started working full time over 30 years ago…
First saw the Grateful Dead in concert over 30 years ago… They’d already been performing for over 25 years at that point and seemed like such a massive juggernaut that had just sort of always been around.
As a young person I relate to this feeling. Sometimes I forget how close to my birth some historical events were. Like, 9/11 was just a couple years before my birth, and the end of the USSR was closer to my birth than I am (and by quite a margin). Which… to me, the USSR feels very much “in the past”.