Ever feel like a song from before made 'you realise how old you are or how much time has passed since the time you first heard it? Well, apparently, there's a name for that phenomenon.
It's referred to as mortality math. And a recent observation based on George Orwell's cult 1949 dystopic novel 1984 comes very close to the phenomenon.
Music conductor and writer Lev Parikian recently put up a brief timeline of the when the book was actually written (1949) and the number of years that lay between them and the fictional reality of 1984. He computed that that is the same number of years that have elapsed since 1984 to now.
"We are now as far away in the future from '1984' as 1984 was when '1984' was published," Parikian wrote on a piece of paper, demonstrating the same diagrammatically.
Orwellian mortality maths. pic.twitter.com/usHo0buVLU— Lev Parikian (@LevParikian) January 30, 2019
The observation blew the minds of Orwell's fans and others. Many noted that they felt really old after finding out the cult classic was written almost 50 years ago.
I think this is significant, like the spell is broken. Tomorrow is a new day. Thanks for this! “If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can't have any result whatever, you've beaten them.”— Salena Godden (@salenagodden) January 30, 2019
Time for a new film adaptation -- today would have been the perfect release date— will brooker (@willbrooker) January 30, 2019
This amazed me (but the rest of the office seemed bored to tears by me) https://t.co/7PpPLZCIvR— Graeme Brown (@graeme_brown) January 30, 2019
They'll all be freaked out when the clocks strike thirteen...— Darren Campbell (@DGDCampbell) January 30, 2019
I read this book in 1993, to me it was a shocking dystopian nightmare, that could never come to pass. In 2018 I read it with my son, to him it was just a meh alternate reality that was more low tech but entirely plausible and not all that bad really— Sharron Mooks (@SharronMooks) January 30, 2019
To give a better bearing of what Parikian was going for, he used the example of 'mortality math'.
