It’s 2006.
Have you ever looked into the future and just tried out some future dates in your head, to get a feel for how weird they ring:
“This is a 2015 Chardonnay from California, it was a very good year.”
It sounds so bizarre. I instinctively imagine any date more than a few years in the future as some crazy trekkied-out space age. I remember when I thought about 2006 that way. And now, here I am. Of course, the technology has gotten better; in some ways I think I would get really frustrated living in 1996, coming from 2006. Slow internet. Extremely limited cell phone use/network. Virtually no peer-to-peer, blogging, social-networking, or sharing of art that we now have happening over the web. No friggin Ipods.
But I can't help feeling, as I sit here in 2006, that in many ways the world is really the damn same as it was in 1996, and quite likely it was just as damn same in 1986 and 1926 and 1574. People have been getting by, and they continue to get by. When you strip away the superficial gloss - the longer life span, the better tech, the marrying for love, the free society, maybe we’re just the same as we used to be.
1 comment:
I think that's what fascinates people who study history: the continuing discovery that we're the same. I delighted to read in a John Adams biography that when his son John Quincy was at Harvard, he got wasted and streaked the quad.
There's something so interesting to read that people haven't changed. Like the way people were preserved in Pompeii, and how we've found their jewelry and decided they'd blend right in more or less today. Or speculating that one of the hominids - the name escapes me, homo habilis? - whatever, could probably sit on a city bus and just come across as "hairy, takes public transportation guy."
But then again that's sort of depressing to think that we're stuck doing the same things over and over. Well you said it, 1996 would be frustrating to no end. I bet there' s already kids out there who wouldn't recognize the sound of modem connecting to the internet...
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