Do you determine an event's date by the year, how old you were, its relation to other events, or...?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Just got to wondering because my friends and I argued for about 15 minutes about when something happened, and it cracked me up how everyone used different benchmarks to determine.

So my friends and I got into a nostalgic conversation about the crappy shit we grew up with, which led down the road to Disney movies. We got into a ranking of best Disney songs, I was a strong proponent of “I Wanna Be Like You,” with which few agreed (jerks), there was talk of “Beauty and the Beast,” and how “Sleeping Beauty” didn’t have enough songs, but I reckoned the few that it had were good. And then somebody brought up “Mulan.” Uhh, what the hell is Mulan? I dunno, apparently it was something that came out after I officially stopped caring about Disney movies. So my response was “Fuck everything that happened after The Lion King.”

But then there was much discussion over when “The Lion King” was, and some people thought it came out as early as 1991 and others as late as 1998. And here I am, with great certainty that it was 94ish because I was certain of my age at the time. (Yeah, I watched “The Lion King” in junior high – no judging, please.) Thankfully, in the age of everyone having the internet in their back pockets, we were able to settle the score. Now because we’re not monsters, we made sure to argue about it first for a few minutes, with one person saying they were certain it was 1997 because that was the year that whatever happened, and someone else saying they know it was 1995 because they were in 6th grade, and whatever else. But then yeah, after much debate, we Googled the shit out of it on our phones. And I was so right, so suck it, friends at the bar!

But anyway, I found it hilarious how differently we contextualized events. My guess is most people don’t just have one method, and for Event A they can guess the date because it was the same year as another thing, yet for Event B, they recall they were 25 years old at the time, and for C, they just know the year because they know the year. I’ve found I just cannot remember a year unless it’s a major historical event whose date has been drilled into my brain. I can do events relative to one another, but not if they’re within the same general period; it has to be something really obvious like “Which came first: Anna Karenina or Anna Wintour?” Otherwise, I either know how old I was or what I was doing at the time. If you ask me when “The Simpsons” movie came out, I’ll tell you it was sometime between 2006 and 2007 because I remember with absolute certainty where I was and what I was doing. If I can’t pin it down to a specific time in my life, you’re getting a 15 year range if you’re lucky. That’s how bad I am at this.

Anyway, enough about me. You?

2

For teenage/kid things, I can usually narrow it down by what grade I was in, who my friends were at the time, etc.

Older than that, I tend to go a lot with where I was living at the time. I moved around a lot in my 20s, so I can usually correlate with “I was in Minneapolis, living on <X> St when I saw that movie because I remember the shower broke before we left” or “It must have been between 93 and 95, because I was living on <Y> street with my friend Jane, who was only there from late summer 93 and then she moved to Washington in the winter of 94…” that kind of thing.

But I also know that I get things wrong. For example, I can distinctly remember my roommate and I fighting over the computer to play the first version of Civilization in the late 80s. Problem is, that game didn’t come out until 1991, when that roommate was living in Vermont and I was in Michigan and Colorado. But I remember us living in Minneapolis, playing that game. This is the kind of thing that drives me batty.

3

I’d hardly call movies events. But usually if I’m trying to narrow down a date I’ll think of life circumstances at the time.

“Oh yeah, I was sharing an apartment with Rod, and working in the maintenance department at xxxx then.” Or, “My son had just been born and I was at xxxx Semiconductor., so it must have been around 2000.”

It seems most of my life can be accounted for in 3 or 4 year segments using the above methodology.

4

I think I probably use quite a large, narrative context that incorporates lots of things that have been mentioned: year at school, friends, where I was living, what certain things looked like, sometimes the context of how I relate to things. Even the relative size of things: I remember my great-grandmother had a giant corner table that towered over me, with the biscuit tin on top (lady fingers!), in one of the houses she lived in. She must’ve moved out of that house at the end of the '80s, if I was that small but still able to remember it quite well.

The year they built the bridge must be about mid to late '90s, around the same time as Titanic coming out. I remember cycling over the bridge with friends when it was new and wobbly, they were the same friends with whom I remember talking about how hot Leo was. After that I changed schools, so it must be around… 1996-1997?

Also, I wanna be like you is clearly the best Disney song, end of. Please tell your friends someone on teh internet said so, that should settle it.

5

As a kid I can kind of figure it out with things like when my parents got divorced, when we moved/my mom married my stepdad, when my little sister was born, etc. I know when the Lion King came out because my little sister was obsessed with it when she was a toddler, and one of my friends in 7th grade was into it.

After that, other than when my daughter was born, it’s mostly where we were living at the time. For some reason, I always remember where I was when things happened (if I remember the thing at all). If I remember talking about whatever event on the phone years ago, I’ll remember where I was living at the time and probably which room I was in. And I’ve moved every year or two (except I’ve been in my current place for three years) so it narrows it down a lot. I don’t think there’s anything that’s happened in my house that I remember, that I don’t know which house I was living in, even if it’s just trying to figure out how old I was when I went on one date with Random Guy X over a decade ago, or when I bought Vacuum X.

6

I can’t really date things after 1999, the year I graduated from college. Every year in school had its own soundtrack. So my memory of the “Lion King” is aligned with yours. I remember watching it my senior year in high school. We sang “The Circle of Life” as our graduation song. That was 1995.

Yesterday I heard Yes’s “Owner of a Lonely Heart”, and my mind instantly determined the song is 30 years old. And whatdoyouknow, that’s accurate almost to the day. I remember this because the song reminds me of traveling to Gary, IN for my grandfather’s funeral, which happened when I was six years old. Any song that was playing on the radio during that time are forever associated with that memory (Genesis’s “That’s All” and Elton John’s “I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues” were also big hits that year.)

7

It depends on the event. For things before college graduation it’s usually by school grade (I don’t remember when Grease came out by “I was in 8th grade” but by “it was on at Regio the weekend before I turned 14, it was rated ‘above 14’ and I must have been the only 13yo in town who wasn’t able to watch it”, but for many other events what I remember is what grade I was in). After college, the most common one is what job did I have at the time. Family births are also a common marker.

Are we talking Jungle Book? Can I just nominate that whole soundtrack?

8

Oh, me and my post-bar posts. Anyway…

Right, this is me, and it seems to be the only way I’m capable of placing events in context. If you’ve got three things that took place within a five year window, and I can’t place what I was up to at the time, my attempt to put them in chronological order would be purely a guess. I’m like “Uhh, I know that they all happened, but I dunno, I can’t tell you what came first.” Some people seem to be able to just recall that this happened before that or can say “That was 1998, same year as such and such,” and I’m like “How do you know that?” I am terrible at just knowing the year or relating things to some other event, unless there’s some obvious reason for why X had to have preceded Y. I love it when people are like, “Remember? That was the same year that blah-de-blah happened,” and no, I don’t remember, but if you say “Remember? We were roommates in Torrance that year,” then I’d be able to say with certainty that it was 2003. My brain is sad; I want a new one.

Right? What kind of people am I hanging out with?

9

Once you have kids, that is how you remember the years. “I know that party had to be before Ophelia was born because I would remember needing to get a baby sitter.” “Nope, that was definitely after 2000 because we had to be super quiet because the baby was sleeping” The more kids you have the more precise you can be, although there is certainly a diminishing point of returns on this method.

For people that moved around a lot as children, that is a very good guide. “Well I know we were living in the house with the crystal doorknobs then.” “Oh that was when we were living on Amaretto Street because we watched it on the TV in the treehouse”

I use both of these methods. I also find I have a very good memory and sense of date for fashions- clothes, cars, home decoration- so if a memory contains these elements I can often be fairly accurate with dates.

10

You’ll find that as you go past the age of 70 that you have so much you need to remember that is way easier to just forget it all…

11

My first pass is usually which house I was living in at the time.
Then (as I moved back to the same house a couple times) which school I was at, if it was when I was still in school.
If it’s when I was at my old job, which girlfriend I was with.
After that I’m lucky to get closer than within 2 years.

12

What grade I was in / what year in college I was

I just graduated last year so it works but I guess I have to get another frame of reference sometime

13

The chronology of Disney songs is too minuscule to put on an absolute time scale.

14

By the year for most events.

I happen to have a very good memory, not only for events relating to my life but also to other people’s lives. Once someone tells me when they did this or that, I’ll remember it and sometimes even correct them when they get their own chronology wrong afterwards. I think it comes from a little game that I’ve played since 1994: everytime someone I met started talking to me about their lives I would compare it with what was going on in my life at the time. Since we were not always the same age, it only made sense to think of it in terms of years. As the number of people that I knew grew, I started mentally picturing little parallel lines with “stickers” on them. I would start thinking things like: “In 1992, I started university, my wife was still in high school, friend Y was on an exchange program in Italy, that German guy I met last year got his first job…” and so on.

I only think in terms of age for very early memories (before 1980), when there’s no way I can possibly remember the year.

15

:slight_smile:

It totally makes sense, and I wish I could do that, but I sadly don’t operate that way. If you ask me when the invasion of Iraq was, I can’t just say 2003. I can say it happened after 9/11 (I can only relate to other events if it;s something super obvious like that), and then I’d start asking myself where I was when that happened, will recall an argument I had in class about it, then pin it down to a year. I almost want to say that I’m going to try get better at dates and not having such a terrible, jumbled memory that can barely manage chronology, but that’s bs; no I’m not.

16

I completely key things to events in my life, and from there I find the date.

Kid: what grade or year of college I was in
20s: what house/city I was living in
30s: when a particular child of mine was born or what age they were
40s-50s: age of kid or what husband I was on :stuck_out_tongue:

17

Pretty much by how old I was – not so much chronological age (although I can figure that out once I have the pieces in place and then get the calendar year, too) but more on who my friends were, what I was doing, where I was living, what year in school/where I was working, etc.

One tricky patch is a long lull after getting married but before having kids – heh, my poor husband, that makes it sound like I was bored – but for the purposes of timing things, it was a long stretch of living in the same place and doing more or less the same stuff with the same people. I mean, thank goodness 9/11 happened in the middle of that, at least that gives me SOME anchor.

Yep, I’ve got a few of these too, like somehow they didn’t get logged in the memory in the right way. It makes me crazy trying to figure out where the incorrect recollection came from in the first place.

18

Moved around a lot as a kid, and then once a summer each summer for almost a decade (college, grad school, marriage) so all my memories are immediately tied to a timeline based on where I was living at the time. If I ever live in one spot for more than a decade I’m screwed, memory-wise.

19

I have lived in the same apartment and worked for the same company since 1988, which makes it almost impossible to date anything from the past 25 years with any accuracy. One method I use that I haven’t seen mentioned is my weight. As a yo-yo dieter in recovery, I can sometimes pinpoint a year by what size I was, what clothes I was wearing, and whether I was starving myself or binging. Sad really, but it does work for me and certain events.

20

My father- and brother-in-law have owned a lot of vehicles in their respective days, which gives them the ability to determine whether Bill and Irene down the street were married in 1972 (when they owned the blue Ford) or 1973 (when they owned the red Chevy). It’s pretty entertaining.