Mind the Gap

This is something that has been going round in my head for quite a while now. It’s been going round because I’ve not been sure how to present it – as a question, or an essay, or an appreciation of the world – but now I’m fed up of it going round in my head and it’s going to come out as just a general blurb of thoughts.

The usual chant of depression is ‘nothing ever changes.’ And, in many senses, it’s true. People, as a species, don’t change much in many ways. But when you sit down and think ‘well, what has changed, even in my lifetime?’ the answer is quite a scary amount.

Okay, there is a wide range of ages reading this, so let’s take a benchmark. Let’s consider a chunk of 50 years. Most of us will expect to live to 50 – most of us will even expect to have 50 years where we are us, not babies or young children or senile dementia patients unconscious of the changes going on around us.

So over the last 50 years, what’s changed? On a major political or ideological level….a fair few things. On a personal level…damn near everything. It is hard to think of a part of my everyday life which would not have been different had I been living 50 years ago. I am an engineer, a woman living in a flat on her own, who spends her evenings watching tv and using the internet. And I could count the number of times I wore a skirt last year on my fingers.

50 years ago we hadn’t sent an object into Earth orbit, nobody had colour tvs, nobody had invented the mini-skirt let alone the internet. Osama bin Laden hadn’t been born yet and Winston Churchill was still alive. The international tension of the time was the cold war, and the Berlin Wall was still 5 years in the future. Elvis hadn’t been in the charts yet and the Cavern Club didn’t exist. Unmarried pregnancies still had huge amounts of stigma attached, and Martin Luther King Jr hadn’t told us he had a dream yet. A truly amazing number of things were very very different indeed.

And, going back further by a multiple of that 50 year chunk – only 8 50-yr-chunks ago, the political tension of the time was the just-failed Gunpowder Plot, and Shakespeare was busy writing King Lear. Only 8 reasonable life-spans ago.

So I still don’t really know what the purpose of this post is. I think it is just to express amazement at just how much people can change. And yet we still stay people – I can still watch King Lear and get as much out of it as an audience at the time did. But how much everything else has changed. And I think that’s amazing, in its own way – that we can survive and prosper in such different circumstances, and that even in the course of one lifetime we can adapt to so much change without hardly even noticing it’s happening.

Thought-blurb over.