> For you younger folks, this is a weird thing we lived through
Such an odd feeling to realize that such intense, shared experiences become completely foreign to more and more people as time goes on. It's weird how all of us are so fixed in the context of the year we were born. For example, I was born in the mid seventies, and to me the moon landing seemed like ancient history as a kid, even though it was only a couple years prior!
Guess I'm just commenting on the feeling that, as I age, things feel more and more ephemeral. Like when you're young it feels a bit like "this is how the world has been and should always be", anything that has happened before is just "history", but as you get older it just feels more like I'm just a speck in the timeline of the universe. Don't know if that's a good or bad feeling.
I teach at a university now, and I'm definitely crossing that threshold where people haven't seen, say, The Matrix because it came out before they were born. Dot-com. 9/11...
We're getting old. Do yourself a favor and don't do the math on how many years you have until you're 60.
I recently watched This is Us and there's an episode on the Challenger explosion. It shows kids in middle school watching the event and it was uncannily exactly as I remember the experience watching it happen in 8th grade.
Museums are a good place to put that energy/feeling. In particular, the Computer History Museum in Mountain View has a lot of, err, computer history. Going to museums about World War II is not remotely the same as having lived through it, but they help those who didn't understand what it was like.
There are three parts to history: ancient history, things you remember living through, and what the young folk think the things you remember living through were like.
(Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres: qui cum oleo coquunt, qui cum butyrum coquunt, qui cum adipe coquunt.)
Such an odd feeling to realize that such intense, shared experiences become completely foreign to more and more people as time goes on. It's weird how all of us are so fixed in the context of the year we were born. For example, I was born in the mid seventies, and to me the moon landing seemed like ancient history as a kid, even though it was only a couple years prior!
Guess I'm just commenting on the feeling that, as I age, things feel more and more ephemeral. Like when you're young it feels a bit like "this is how the world has been and should always be", anything that has happened before is just "history", but as you get older it just feels more like I'm just a speck in the timeline of the universe. Don't know if that's a good or bad feeling.