Does anyone else reflect on 'Closer to Cleopatra than...' moments in their personal lives?

[Thurien]

We are told we are closer in time to Cleopatra today than when the first pyramids were built. Then there is Tyrannosaurus Rex which we are closer to than Stegosaurus.

Interesting enough, but what blows my mind more is time distances in my own life. Today I took a detour through the village where I was born and where I returned to live with my young family. There, one of the DC's and I sat on a small hill by the wood's edge and watched young squirrels playing. DC was about 3 and shreiking with joy as they gambled about.

As I drove through today, I reflected that my own early years seemed like a whole eternity before DC came along. It was really like a different life. Yet from the squirrels to now seems like just a decade or two, but still very much connected to now.

Anyone else get these type of thoughts?

The first Sarah Connor who gets gunned down by Arnie in The Terminator is 35 according to the subsequent news reports. She looks older than me (late 40's). Unless I'm fooling myself of course.

OP was the actor Alfred Enoch ? He is 35, his dad died recently, his dad was 99.

I was thinking about this a while ago and came up with a theory - no idea whether it's true.

Pop music in any kind of modern sense didn't come into being until the 1950s - the first UK singles chart was produced in 1952. Therefore, in the mid-1980s, there was a history of what you might call playable music on a pop station going back about 30 years.

Fast-forward to 2023 and the 'playable' music history now spans 70 years. Therefore if you divide it by fractions of time, the bar has moved for something to be called a 'golden oldie'. Say in 1983 it might have been an 'oldie' if more than 5 years old - so anything older than the last 1/6 of pop music history - in 2023 your 1/6 of music history spans nearly 12 years.

Of course I don't mean it's a science in that exact way or that any kind of calculation takes place, but it may work loosely on that psychological principle.

Or I might have hugely over-thought it 😃

1995 was 10 years ago and I will fight anyone who says otherwise! It will always be 10 years ago.

I remember seeing the film the wedding singer when it first came out and viewing the 80's as vintage. It was everyday life and now it is iconic. There don't seem to be the same nostalgia films set in the early 2000's.

Yes. I only recently realised I was born a mere 15 years after the 2nd WW ended. 15 years is like yesterday but the war was ancient history!

There are women who were born after the millennium who are mothers. How the F did THAT happen, they should be, like, 6!

EtonMessy · Today 18:29
Helen Viola Jackson was the last surviving widow of a confederate soldier from the American Civil War . She only died in 2020 , 155 years after the end of the war. She was 17 when she married , her civil war veteran husband was 93”

Holy cow!

Not in the same league but our 21 year old son’s (and 29 year old daughter’s) great grandparents were Victorians, born in 1896 and 1895.

Lots of people at school didn’t believe him until he took in the family tree. They still had great grandparents living up the road, born in the 1960s 😁

I was updating someone's file at work today. Dob 1990. I had to check a few times before realising they weren't in their teens but were 34. 30 bloody 4!

Helen Viola Jackson was the last surviving widow of a confederate soldier from the American Civil War . She only died in 2020 , 155 years after the end of the war. She was 17 when she married , her civil war veteran husband was 93

Holy cow indeed! Is that a record for an age-gap marriage? Imagine the AIBU - 'am I unreasonable to be concerned that 17 year old DD wants to marry a 93 year old?'

I can't get my head around the fact that my grandad was a Victorian. (Born in 1900 and Queen Victoria died 3 months later). He lived to be in his 90s
My uncle, one of his eldest children, has just celebrated his 100th birthday, so was born in George V reign.

I think young women marrying old soldiers was quite common practice not just from the US civil war. The men got somebody to look after them in their old age & the women got a guaranteed pension when they died.

Someone was talking about the style of the band All Saints returning to fashion (combat trousers with vests) and mentioned that Never Ever was released nearly 27 years ago. I’d have thought 17. They and Oasis, Spice Girls, Blur all seem so much more recent, along with Friends, Frasier, Ally McBeal, S&TC. Tony Blair too.

And I still think of Zara, William, Harry as “Young Royals” - twentysomethings.

The Olympics. I think of Beijing as about eight years ago and Seoul about twenty years ago. I think of Denise Lewis as someone who retired from athletics about six years ago. I think of Tom Daley as a teenager. I think of Andy Murray as someone who came on the scene about six years ago.

In the long hot summer of 1976 when I was four, my grandmother’s neighbour Mrs M turned 100 and we popped into her back garden where her family had put on a small informal tea party. She was incredibly frail, I remember being fascinated by her brooch and she let me try it on. Blows my mind that I’ve interacted with someone born in 1876. Someone who became middle-aged during WW1 and was a pensioner before WW2.

“As for man, his days are like grass;
As a flower of the field, so he flourishes.
For the wind passes over it, and it is gone,
And its place remembers it no more.”
psalm 103:15

Just made me check but my 19 year old has a great grandfather born in 1887.

I often think about the life of someone born in 1890 who made it to 100. They would have grown up with Queen Victoria on the throne, everyone wearing victorian clothes, horse drawn carriages everywhere. And then over the course of their lifetime they saw 2 world wars, the flappers of the 1920s, motor cars, gas and electricity, the mini skirt, the pill, pop music, disco, new romantics, computers, aeroplanes, credit cards, ATMs. I doubt that any generation will ever see that much change ever again.

I was born in 1976. Whenever I think about it I find it amazing that there are less years between my birth and the Second World War, than there are between now and my birth.
i just don’t feel old enough for that to be a fact!

This is what blows my mind also @NorthFaceofthelaundrypile

Also, Abba's Waterloo was 50 years old earlier this year. You were not even born, but to me it feels like in my time.

Incredible

Me too. I was born when the Beatles were the newest big thing.

All four of my grandparents were born before Irish independence, only one in the 20th century.

My grandparents were born in the 1890s. My youngest dc is 4.
There are probably 4 year olds who have great grandparents who were born in the 1970s.

This post has made me think , there was 20 odd years age difference between my oldest and youngest dgp. I just thought of them all as 'old'.

And today I bumped into a woman who babysat my kids when she was a teenager. She is head of HR at a biggish company, mother of three, owns her own house, drives a minivan... mind blowing.

Similarly a grandson of the 10th American president - who took office in 1841 - is still alive 🤯

I agree with this. I used to remember every single year and everything they happened in that decade. Now it’s a blur. And your teen years are barely anything and yet the difference between 14 and 16 seems enormous!

The tortoise that Darwin studied and used to discover evolution didn’t die that long ago! The things he would have lived through.

Also animals that live for a hundred years, some aquatic life forms too. So weird.

He married her to give her a pension.

It seems to me like there was more distinction between decades in the second half of the 20th century - the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s - so immediately recognisable, especially in terms of their styles and their music. Are the 2000s, 2010, 2020s that easily distinguishable? If you watch something now made in 2005 does it look dated in the way that something from the 70s looked dated in the 90s?

I think the PP who was talking about how long pop
music had been around in those days is on to something. The explosion of popular culture after WW2 was so enormous than maybe it just moved and changed quicker than now and the decades are more differentiated than they are now, and therefore seem to cover a longer time period in our memories, whereas now things blur more.

Or maybe that’s what all aging people think about the culture they grew up with …