Just before going to sleep last night (and yes, we made it past midnight thanks to a three-episode binge of Orange is the New Black, which we’ve just discovered) my wife and I had a brief conversation about whether our parents/other people older than us had the weird feeling of Perpetually Living in the Future that we’ve had for the last fifteen years, except in the 1980s and 1990s.  While I haven’t actually asked anyone (because that would spoil my fun) I have to imagine that the answer’s yes, but that post-2000 This Is The Future Syndrome has got to be a lot worse.  With the obvious exception of 1984 aside, most speculative fiction, even from early in the 20th century, still used years beginning with a 2 as an indicator of The Future.  I’m sure there are more books and stories set in the near future from the perspective of the early-to-mid twentieth century, but there’s a lot more stuff set in the 2000s and beyond.

The other weird thing that living in The Future has done to me– and I really hope that I’m not the only one here, but who knows– is that it’s perpetually screwed up my perspective of how long ago anything happened.  If something happened in this century, I’m fine.  2005 was eight/nine years ago, right?  Got it, no problem.  But I still, fourteen years into the 21st century, am doing “subtract from 2000” whenever I have to quickly determine how long ago any event that happened in the 20th century was.  I referred to 1992 as “ten years ago” last week.  I just realized this morning that the hundredth anniversary of World War I was coming up in July.  I perpetually refer to WWI as “eighty or ninety years ago” (for some reason, saying “85” is too precise, but still wrong) during the rare occasions when I speak of it to my students.  The 1960s?  Forty years ago.  The fifties?  Fifty years ago.

It’s been the 21st century now for a bit.  I probably ought to stop this.

Also, judging from the math I’ve done during this post and corrected, I appear to be skipping 2014 altogether and going straight to 2015.  Sooner or later I’ll need to start rounding to 2020.  That’s fucked.  I can’t be alive in 2020.  That’s the goddamn future.  It can’t be the present; it breaks all of my stories.