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?

For some reason recently I was thinking about a bloke I worked with in the 90s who used to go on and on about his baby daughter. I vaguely thought 'She must be in her teens now' and then it hit me she'd be nearly 30 - nearly 10 years older than I was when I worked with her dad,

I also get really weird sometimes when I remember things from my childhood and memories with my parents and grandparents and now I see how we’re all in different roles now. Feels strange and sad and like nothing lasts or means anything.

Or I have a really strong memory about something that happened at work and it was all so important and I realise that absolutely none of that team work there anymore and everyone has disintegrated into a new life and I don’t know where. I wonder if they all remember the same memories.

I find the work things especially weird, I think because you spend so much of your day there and then you all move on.

Radio 1 plays ‘old music’ from the 00s and kids things it’s old 😂

Yes, my dd1 is now older than I was when dh and I got married (24).

I remember my absolute joy watching Waterloo on TV -the first time it was performed live on Eurovision- while I was at the youth club in Belfast.
I was 14 and it was a terrible year because of the Troubles.
That night was so special, the memory of it still brings me to tears.

I get that with kids born 2000 and after are actually adults and I remember the frenzied run up to 2000 😖😖 i feel so old

I find the older I get the more events I have been alive half the time since. For example, when I was a child, the second world war was ancient history. Then one day I suddenly found I had been alive more than half the time since it ended. That did not used to be the case.

Now I find I have suddenly been alive more than half the time since the first world war ended.

One day I will have been alive more than half the time since Queen Victoria died - but not yet

Being in my thirties, mine is 9/11. Well over half my life time away, and doesn't feel like it at all.

Or, to bring another event into it, the time from the fall of the Berlin Wall to 9/11 is half the time from 9/11 to now. But to me the Berlin Wall is history and 9/11 is current events.

@Awrite

I do disagree massively with this. When Linda Hamilton played Sarah Connor in Terminator 1, she was 27 - and she looked even younger (IMO) More like 24.

No way did she look like mid to late 40s! Are you thinking of someone else?

No, that's not ringing any bells, but thank you. It was someone more famous.

Good explanation.

And you hear people talking about 9/11 happening before they were born 🤯

I love rewatching old sitcoms like Frazier and Friends then realise they’re now so much older 😭

I was reading about Leon Marchand. His mum was born just three years before me. This was completely shocking to me because he’s a grown man. Then I realised that he’s actually only 5 years older than dd1.

I happen to live near my old secondary school. Someone had written their name and the date in what must have been newly poured concrete at the top of some stairs going into the yard. It’s still there. The date was the year I started there. Graffiti from 25 years ago is still there!!!

Wait what’s the Stone Age bit?

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?
I wonder that too. Maybe they are to younger people.

Have I missed something? How could a 21yo have great-grandparents who were born in the 1960s?

He's amazing! I saw him last year in Hyde Park as well. Two of the best nights of my life.
Keeping to the theme of the thread - my son will be 40 this year. When he was born, I was 10 years younger than he is now. But I was definitely more grown up - well, that's what I tell myself!

I’ve been reading a few time related facts. Here:

There are people alive today who will be around in the 22nd century.

There is a site of games called Neal.fun that has one bit of entertainment for idle fingers called Who Was Alive? It plots who was alive at the same time as who (sometimes revealing when earlier generation rep. was about 75 and upcoming generation rep. was just born). It is rather compelling and I keep thinking up this kind of question when reading about other people who had a very good chance of crossing over, perhaps taking the same transport or eating in the same places whether they knew it or not, in the years c. 1908 to 1928. We're in that 20s-ish equivalent now and that also adds its own angle.

Could you be thinking of Julio Iglesias rather than an actor, OP? His younger brother was born when he was 60. Their dad was 88 at the time.

A hideous one. The first auschwitz prisoners began to arrive in the same year as McDonald’s was founded. 😳 1940

Marilyn Monroe and the late Queen Elizabeth were born in the same year.

Oxford university existed for hundreds of years before the aztec empire

I was watching the Americans which is a great series, including the great Welsh actor Mathew Rhys, and it takes place in the 80s. I grew up in the 80s, completely unaware that it was just 20 years after the end of the Korean War and that my parents were born in WWII. Time moves swiftly.