The Awl linked to this list of things that are 20 years old and things that are 40 years old. I was actually thinking about Nevermind the other day and realized that it was indeed 20 years old. Sheesh.

What got me here though was that it points out that the way I think of things from the early 70s, i.e., things that pre-date me by 5-10 years, is the way that high schoolers today think about Nevermind and things of that time. Some salient examples for me are Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory or Dirty Harry. I like them. They don’t seem “old” per se, but they do have a certain 70s quality that makes them feel definitively older than me. By the time I was paying attention, movies didn’t really look like that anymore. Nevermind, by counterexample, is something that blew up when I was in 9th grade. I was fully and totally aware of it happening. So it will always seem modern to me.

But today’s 16-year-old thinks of Nevermind the way I think of Willy Wonka. Great, sure (at least they better think that, lousy kids), but old. Pop culture references to it seem as important to them as Animal House references do to me, which is to say, dated and irrelevant. Ouch. And it will only get worse, of course. It’s not that I’m feeling down about being old, although I’m getting more and more aware of time passing. I distinctly remember when my Mom went to her 20 year high school reunion. My sister and I were I guess like 11 and 13, respectively. Seemed like something that adults went to, and I would never get there, or it would just seem so different. Well, my 20-year reunion will be in four years. (Not that I’m going, but still.) (And that’s another thing. When I was in high school, I absolutely would have thought I was going to go to future reunions.)