For many people, remembering history from five years ago is a challenge. A few decades ago seems like eons, so people tend to ignore anything before their lifetime. It’s all ancient history.
Is it really that long ago?
I have previously discussed how we are all part of the continuity of civilization and a link the chain of history. Part of that concept is we know people who have lived decades before us, and they knew people from earlier eras, and so on since the beginning. Suddenly, the past doesn’t seem so distant through the connections we have, and from what has been passed down to us.
Neil Howe, writing in The Fourth Turning is Here, describes this as our personal history span, which can be double your natural life:
Most of us possess first-person personal contact, through our families, to an impressive span of historical time time…consider a Gen-X woman born in 1965…[and] the oldest person she personally got to know as a young child…Very likely, this was a…grandparent (or great-grandparent) born in the mid-1890s. Let’s then imagine how long this Xer will live. Suppose we project that she lies to a least age ninety (in 2055), when she gets to know a grandchild (or great-grandchild) who in turn could be expected to live to the year 2130.
Now let’s measure this total span of time—from the first moment in the life of the oldest person this Xer got to know personally as a child to the last moment in the life of the youngest person she will know personally before passing away…this stretch of years—let’s call it her personal history span—stretches from 1895 to 2130, or 235 years.
When you look at our lives like this, you can see the length of impact you can have, and your connections with a not-so distant past.
As Howe writes, “As we contemplate the full range of these experiences—in the lives of those who once cared for us and in the lives of those whom we will someday care for—we can’t help but look for structure, parallels, and lessons…[as] Ibn Khaldun observed at the very dawn of modernity: ‘The past resembles the future more than one drop of water resembles another.'”
Darrick Dean 