Anyone born before Generation Z can clearly remember what it was like to think about “the year two thousand.” It carried such a futuristic vibe to it — in such stark contrast to the past ten, hundred, or thousand years: years that all began with a one. Everything would change when we incremented that first digit. By the year two thousand, we’d have flying cars, robot butlers, and ice cream completely made out of small frozen dots.

Most rang in the new millennium with a combined sense of hope and dread, that latter mostly fueled by Y2K fears. I, for one, did not fear any major Y2K issues since I was part of that invisible army of software developers who’d spent the previous three or four years studying it and fixing it.

Fast forward

I blinked a few times and suddenly the calendar flipped over to 2010. What I remember clearly about that year is that suddenly it felt like the two thousands were real. I guess up until then it kinda felt like the years just went from 1999 to 19100 to 19101 and so on. When we hit 2010, though, it was like: wow, okay, this millennium is here to stay.

Fast forward

I blinked a few more times and suddenly it’s 2020. We’re now somehow one fifth of the way to the “new” century. And it’s times like this my brain dives deep into one of its favorite pastimes: temporal pondering.

It’s All About Context

Time fascinates me on so many levels, but the one that gets me most is how the human brain is so woefully incapable of handling it. Ten years from now feels like forever while ten years ago feels like two weeks. More difficult still is to conceptualize time periods before our birth. Any teenagers who watched Marty McFly first travel from 1985 to 1955 saw him land in a world that may as well have been populated with as many dinosaurs as poodle skirts. Those same teens today feel like 1985 isn’t that long ago.

Two time-related things happened to the internet (and, by extension, to me) just yesterday. The first was the realization that The Wonder Years — a show which debuted in 1988 and set in the year 1968 — would be set in the year two thousand were it to debut today. Younger audiences in the late 80s felt like 1968 could’ve been the year World War I began. Those viewers today are freaking out because 2000, clearly, was only like a year and a half ago.

The second time-related thing had to do with the Brimley/Cocoon Line. As you may remember, Wilford Brimley played one of the senior citizens in Cocoon, a film which came out like a year and a half ago. He was the youngest of the senior actors: by some twenty years or more. But as old as he looked in the film, he was only forty-nine when principal photography began. Granted, makeup artists whitened his mustache and hair, and gave him more wrinkles and age spots. But still…

When the film hit theaters, he was only 18,530 days old. So it’s become a bit of a fad to make special note of when today’s actors have crossed that same line. Mostly because the vast majority of them do not look like . . . Cocoon Senior Citizen Wilford Brimley. The actor who made the rounds yesterday was the ageless Paul Rudd. The first time I’d heard about this phenomenon was in 2015, when Tom Cruise hit that line about the time Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation came out.

Cocoon.

Mission: Impossible.

It’s kind of hard to believe, isn’t it? And before we leave this topic, other non-Brimley-looking actors who’ve passed the BCL are:

• Matthew McConaughey
• Jennifer Lopez
• Brad Pitt
• Naomi Watts
• Johnny Depp
• Halle Berry
• Will Smith
• Every single “Friend”

Final Thought

Here’s a question. What were you doing on or around October 11, 1994? A lot of things happened that year: NAFTA established, the Channel Tunnel opened, a White Bronco raced down a California highway, Amazon.com founded, Forrest Gump told us what life was like, The Lion King broke all the records, not to mention every single “Friend” got together and started up Friends.

But on October 11, 1994, can you recall the first moon landing? You know, an event that probably seemed like it took place during World War I? Well, brace yourself. That exact same amount of time has now passed again: 9,214 days to be precise. Suddenly nine thousand days doesn’t seem like that long a time. Unless, of course, you turn it around and project to the future. That would be March 26, 2045.

Coincidentally, that’s the same year my debut novel will be published.