One thing that's strange about growing up is that eventually events you live through become history.

And little pieces of it get lost because they don't fit in people's modern moral or social frameworks or the long narrative arcs.

But you still remember them.

— Alan Cole (@AlanMCole) October 23, 2021

Great thread. Getting older is watching events that you lived through become “conspiracy theory” and/or “offensive” if they aren’t just forgotten altogether.

And I think that he’s right about the irrealizability of recapturing the visceral feel of a time. It’s just impossible to describe the great optimism that nearly everyone felt in the early to mid 1990s. You bring it up now, people look at you like you’ve lost your mind and disbelieve it ever happened. But it did. I was there and I remember it very well. Sure, you can read a bit about it in newspaper and magazine articles from that era and get a glimpse or two, but that tells you nothing about how it felt, what it was like to have culture-wide certitude that the world was inevitably getting better and that we were bound for a wonderful and ever-improving future together.

Now, we don’t believe we can solve even the simplest problems. Then, we thought and more importantly felt like we could solve all our problems. Both views are wrong, but I can certainly tell you which one was more inspiring, and more likely to actually result in improvement in the world.

Living long enough means that your history becomes fiction; time erases the nuance and the true fades into impressions distorted and obscured by the frenzy of the present.