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.
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.
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”.