this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2023
202 points (99.5% liked)

Ask Lemmy

27064 readers
3311 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions

Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected]


Rules: (interactive)


1) Be nice and; have funDoxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them


2) All posts must end with a '?'This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?


3) No spamPlease do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.


4) NSFW is okay, within reasonJust remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected]. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].


5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.


Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Tech Support

No Stupid Questions

You Should Know

Reddit

Jokes

Ask Ouija


Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How "not old" everything is. I'm not old, but when I was young I thought people my age were at the general end of one's life. People also are surprisingly clueless.

[–] ccunning 27 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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 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.

[–] scottywh 5 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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".