So I was born late 60s.
Things from say the 40s are ancient to me.
But things that happened in say the 90s seem basically modern.
This is why "good old days" are so unreliable - it was good cause you were a kid, and sheltered, not because it was better than today.
Our fridge died and it was cheaper to replace it than repair it. My partner was upset, because she was like “we just bought it like 6 years ago!”
We bought it in 2005.
It's all a matter of proportion. When you were fifteen, something twenty years past happened more than a lifetime ago. Now it happened when you were in your thirties, less than half YOUR lifetime ago. Something that happened five years ago might as well be last week.
I was reminded recently that the old Volkswagen ad with Nick Drake's "Pink Moon" is 25 years old. That hit me hard.
Or facts like Devo's Whip It is as old today as Bing Crosby's "Pennies from Heaven" (1936) was when Whip It came out.
Of all true things this is one of the truer ones. ~Yesterday I was reading about the massive crowd at the Kerry stump speech at Tom McCall Waterfront Park, and Eddie Vedder was there. I didn't yet know the swiftboating and gay-marriage-panic attacks would succeed.
When I was a little kid, the Vietnam war was *forever* ago, the withdrawal having happened when local third graders were born. Meeting Vietnam vets still on active duty (my stepdad was a reservist) shifted *forever* ago to "before my parents were born". Now it's more like "well before WWII".
Like, I anticipated that stuff I actually remember happening wouldn't feel as far away the older I got, because grown-ups said that *constantly*, but I didn't expect that "a long time" would end up fixed to roughly double whatever my current age is.
I was born and raised in Los Angeles, where the oldest thing was San Fernando Mission back from 1797. *THE OLDEST*.
I think I can find buildings older than that just up the street from here...
Yup. In the part of Texas where I grew up, there were no remaining structures that dated to the 1800s. I think the earliest was 1920-ish, so less than 70 years before I was born.
Goodness, I rather assumed there would be some buildings from the 1600s in California (and possibly structures from pre-European civilisations) but apparently not! Not only do structures not come from then but there was no occupation by Europe in the 1600s really.... huh!
First Spanish/English explorers in California were mid to late 1500s, first Spanish buildings were just before 1700, but the Spanish didn't really get going until late 1700s. The indigenous Californians built mostly (entirely?) in wood, unlike stone/mound construction elsewhere in the Americas.
Yeah, I thought there'd be more mid to late 1600s stuff. Instead all the surviving buildings are quite late 1700s. I thought SOME of the locals might have built some structures in stone since they had in other places but I knew that was only maybe...
I totally understand. Back in 1985, the 1965 looked like a world totally apart, if I think about 2004 it seems the same as today. Does it mean that we are getting old? 😅
I just read a memoire from 1860s. A person from my home island (öland, Sweden) described his background, how he moved on to construct naval ships in Boston and eventually ended up back home in Sweden as an industrialist. What he described didn't feel too far off. Sure, different, but not too much.
I've narrowed it down to age 17 for me, stuff I watched when I was 16 is sepia toned and ancient, but stuff that came out when I was in my early twenties still feels new
