The warp in time from the year 2000

 The numbers of the years we live in are just numbers. The religiously neutral way to refer to the year is "C.E." or "common era". Although the hypothetical "year 1" came from a Christian calculation, that was long ago, and (likely because of cultural dominance) that's what has stuck. People realize there is no other, more logical place to start. Older cultures that reset the year each time a new emporer ascended to the throne were surely nightmares if you cared about history.

As the millenium approached, there were arguments about whether the true millenium might be a year earlier or later based on whether the first year was "year one". One quote that dismissed that whole issue that I thought was exactly right was, "It's all arbitrary, and I'm in it for the zeros".

But I've noticed a certain warping in my notion of time, a sort of distortion in time caused by that number 2000 and its properties. In 1980 it was just 20 years to the millenium. In 1990 it was just 10 years away. In 1997 it was just 3 years away. All those numbers about a significant future event were small. 1997 was notably later than 1994 because it was only 3 years to the millenium instead of 6.

And then -- it happened. Y2K. Nothing major broke. But starting on January 1, 2000, how do we think of years? Well, the next millenium will be the year 3000, and that's a fair amount of time away. Maybe a reasonable milestone on the way will be 10% of the way, which will happen in 2100. It's 100 years from now... Wait! 100 years from now is a LONG time from now! Even though all those zeros showed up at once, to live on a human scale we have to ignore a couple of them. A century is a long time, and that happens in 2100. Decades happen in the meantime. Stunningly, 22% of that first post-millenial century has gone by already. "Turn of the century" when I was growing up referred to 1900 and nothing else. If someone used it to refer to 2000 in the first few years after 2000, I certainly would have thought it odd. Now, 22 years later, we have to ask which turn over the century? Perhaps some disambiguate by calling it the turn of the millenium, but that risks expanding our time horizons to a much bigger scale than intended or desired.