I went to a 90’s-themed dance party on Saturday, hosted by one of my most fun-loving Seattle friends.
Remember the 1990s? With its Spice Girls, Dr. Dre, Britney Spears, Nirvana, Alanis Morissette, Jay-Z, Mariah Carey, Lauryn Hill, TLC?
What struck me the most about this party was that:
1) The 1990’s are far enough away now that we can have a themed-party centered around them. (I wore a choker necklace and Mary Jane’s. One girl dressed like Ginger Spice.)
2) Without fail, every time a new song came on, someone in the room would say something like, “No way. This wasn’t the 1990s. This song is only like (insert number less than 10) years old.”
Or, one person kept cracking me up with, “Naw. This song is contemporary. I just listened to that last week.”
At one point, I said, “You know, 2001 was 10 years ago.” Everyone expressed wonder over the sentiment.
Most of us at the party were in our 20s, 30s and 40s. Why do we reflect on the passage of time, and gasp?
Maybe it’s reaching a point where events that happened so many years ago are vivid in memory, not blurred like the soft-edged reflections of childhood.
But I think it’s deeper than that.
Time is really hard to understand — like money and health, there’s never enough of it, we’re never satisfied with it, and it is ever-fleeting.
My former astronomy professor, Richard Berendzen, opened up his class with this on the first day:
Time. We kill time, spend time, lose time, make time, beat time, take time, waste time; but we virtually never consider time, much less understand it. Yet to view events properly and possibly even to perceive ourselves in rightful context, let us go back in time, even to its beginning.
Time, you may know, is the fourth dimension. While we can move whichever way we want in the first three dimensions, in the fourth, there is but one way and one speed:
Forward, at 60 minutes per hour.
So true. I think this is why I’m constantly looking at guys who are 25 and thinking they’re my age. I can’t believe enough time has passed to make me in my 30s! For the first time ever, I wish time would slow down.
Yes! My husband was saying that “20 years ago” means the ’70s. Even though, by now, the 70s are more than 30 years ago.
I seriously think about this all the time – eg, w/ respect to technology (http://bryce.vc/post/5134502188/ten-years-of-innovation-highlighted-in-one-night “In less than 10 years the world and the technology we use to experience it has changed so completely.”), sports (the Cubs star SS was born in 1990), & friends (next fall, one will have have a son enrolling in the same school where we met in 1st grade – which just doesn’t seem like that long ago).
It was very interesting to read “Time & a Cosmic Perspective” by Richard Berendzen, & I love the way you ended this post.
HMF: That post captures exactly what I thought after OBL was killed — I remembered 9/11/01 and how the technology has changed so much. Hours after his capture, I looked up his house on Google maps, and there was a marker over it – can you believe it?
And people born in the 1990s aren’t kids any more. Anyone born in 1993 can vote.
And finally, yes, children are walking time measurement sticks. =)
Thanks for your comment.
This was coincidental – I was reading http://nyti.ms/kju44i (“For Buyers of Web Start-Ups, Quest to Corral Young Talent”) & last 2 ¶s mentioned the start-up Baydin & I remembered reading, a few months ago, about 1 of its 3 employees, Aye Moah, so I looked her up on Twitter, & this is her most recent tweet: “RT @adachis Your actions affect how you perceive time. Read this http://t.co/ZW28UHk and then read the much more fascinating article it’s based on.” Both are really interesting.
Fascinating — maybe this is why I am always trying to learn new things. Whether it’s my work-related research, or adult piano and yoga and new sports!
This is a conversation spurring topic; after talking to my friend Brian from the old think tank he informed me that nano-technology was to quarter size electronic devises every eight years. Then after some time had passed I had learned that two way radios could be injected behind the ear. Iwas a big fan of OMNI Magazine in the 80’s that seems like a thousand years ago haha.
Enjoyed the article.
Poppafred