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Outside of culture shock, time shock is probably the most relatable experience. Luckily, I'm not alone. A tweet by Twitter user @quartzen has gone viral, sharing their own feelings about time. And you gotta admit, there's something to their logic.
I'd be willing to bet some part of the tweet feels familiar.
It feels pretty accurate.
For me, 2010 to 2013 feels like it was both decades ago, and also like it was last week. 1990 feels like a foreign time period, but is also the time during my formative years.
Sadly, this kind of perspective on time isn't due to some kind of sci-fi time dilation, but the more mundane anchoring of specific times to events. Growing up around this time has anchored many of our minds to the year 2000, which explains the first three decades on the list.
But why do so many find the other parts so relatable?
I would suspect it has to do with 2001. Since that time, there hasn't been a defining moment in 18 years that crystallizes in your mind quite the same as the horrible tragedies of that year.
This makes the last two decades a mishmash of everything that happened, leading to it feeling like so long ago, and also like it happened yesterday. This despite the fact we can clearly point to a difference between pop culture and trends.
But it's also why so many agree with the first half of the list and maybe want to change some things with the second half.
This doesn't even touch on our experience for how quickly time is moving. That doesn't even have a set of certain explanations, though it's something being researched extensively.
It's been shown that as you get older, it can feel like time moves faster. But only in retrospect. In an article from Scientific American Mind, researchers posited that this is because of our lack of new experiences as adults compared to when we're children and still learning about the world.
That still leaves the question of how we are expected to relate to time when it seems all over the place.
I'd be willing to bet there's a pretty solid timeframe from your younger years, with everything in the past two to three decades a strange soup of happening last week and also so long ago you can barely remember it.
Whatever your perspective on time, your best option is to make new memories with your loved ones. Even if the research is wrong about new experiences, it's hard to argue that it's still enjoyable to do that.
For the ultimate time warp, Dr. Who 50th Anniversary special: The Day of the Doctor, is available here.
