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mother time General or meta (quokk.au)
submitted 10 months ago by to c/historymemes@piefed.social
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[–] 15 points 10 months ago (9 children)

I mean, people kinda are aware of it? We all know our grandparents are old, and that’s just two generations— knowing your great grandparents is considered a rare honor because of how old they must be, and that’s just three. So a long time spanning relatively few people isn’t really a shocking revelation, is it?

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  • [–] 9 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    Years ago I had a hospice patient that was 108 years old. Her main caregivers were her children who were in their 80's, with support of their children who were in their 50's. And yes, they had children who were also starting to have children. Family get togethers had to be something!

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago (4 children)

    That's also the weird thing about the "experienced" past.

    When we think about what things were like "in the past", we think of what they were like for the oldest people we know, and if we are lucky we get a couple stories from them about their parents or grandparents.

    So for me, my experienced past ends in 1930.

    The experienced past is the lense through which we see the whole past, even though it's such a tiny sliver of the actual past.

    Remember this in this context: Whenever someone says "In the past X was always the case", what they really mean was "For my grandparents X was the case", and they likely don't even realize that.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago (3 children)

    which is why studying history is so important, it's actively expanding your experienced past. At this point the middle ages no longer feels like a long time ago.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago (2 children)

    Studying history helps with an intellectual understanding of the slice of the past that was documented in history. So that's helpful, but it's not the same as the "experienced" past, where you have an emotional and intuitive understanding of how things worked.

    The history of the middle ages, for example, pretty much only cover nobility. There's not a lot of history about the day-to-day life of the bottom 90% of the people. You know, the kind of people you and I would have been if we had lived 1500 years ago.

    Also, the past isn't a homogeneous thing at all, neither in time nor in space. So things that might be true for 950 CE in one town might be totally different two towns over or 50 years later.

    Just as a small example in the more recent history:

    Women not working outside the home was the standard for the middle class in 1950. It was not the standard for the middle class in 1900. Then it was the standard for nobility, but regular women would be working full-time jobs.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago (1 child)

    i'm not sure why you bring all of that up? i said studying history, that.. obviously includes the things you mention, that is what it means to study history.........

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago

    Because studying history is not enough to have an emotional and intuitive understanding of it, as I said.

    The historical records are not deep enough. They don't contain all the stuff you get from having lived through a period and/or personally knowing someone who did.

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