I was recently doing a little thought experiment - I was trying to think of at least one news event from every year since I was born (1972). No research, just seeing what popped up in my head.
I was surprised to find that the years that were most difficult for me to come up with anything were much more recent - 2007, 2013, and 2015.
Obviously this is a very subjective activity - but I’m curious if anyone else has a similar experience, and if there are any theories as to why this might be.
My brain doesn’t really work that way. If you ask me to think of something that happened or what was a hit song in a given year, I haven’t a clue. Conversely, with a few exceptions, name a news event, and I can’t tell you what year it was. I can tell you details about the event, but I can’t tell you when it happened.
I tried, and I found that for many events I was off by a year or two. I was only born in '84 and I didn’t try going back further than 1990. Part of the difficulty for me is that for the years I was in school, my grade was close to the actual year (e.g., I started fourth grade in 1994). The problem that causes for me is I tend to map anything that happened “in fourth grade” to 1994, even though the majority of the school year took place in 1995. In my case, this led me to thinking the Tokyo subway sarin gas attack and the OKC bombing occurring in 1994, when in fact they occurred in 1995.
I can’t think in terms of years, but I can think in terms of grades, which is sufficient for when I was a kid, and can even extend to college a bit. But, after that, it just kinda blends together unless I have another event or similar I can use to date it.
Oh yes, this is definitely a thing for me. I was born in 1981 and the first news event that I remember that I can actually put a date to is the '88 election. I remember going to an actual voting booth with my dad, which is the only time I’ve ever been in one.
Obviously I was around for other big events like the Challenger explosion but I dont remember them. Even the big newsworthy events that I do remember I couldn’t tell you when they were. For instance I remember vividly watching OJ Simpson’s white Bronco freeway chase on live TV but couldnt even tell you the year it happened. All I remember is it was summer because on that day my mom had some friends over to pick blackberries – something she never did before and I don’t think ever did again – and instead they sat around watching the news.
Same with the death of Steve Irwin. I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when I heard about it, but as to when it was? Sometime between April 2002 and November 2007 is as cloae as I can get. Same with the Columbia explosion. Both because those I heard about while working at the same place and those were the dates I worked there.
Even more recents things like Trump withdrawing from the Paris agreement or the Iran nuclear deal I couldn’t tell you when they happened, just that it was sometime between January of 2017 and January of 2021.
There’s a type of diminishing returns at play here. The older I get, the more years I have to list, but my memory can no longer deal with that many events. At my current age, there’s no way I can come up with one event for each of my 76 years.