Back when this blog had a more active comment section, one of my favorite activities was crowdsourcing new names for number or data-based errors people made a lot on the internet. Within this, one of my favorite discussions was the one where we came up with the concept of the Hrair Line, defined by our hivemind as “a somewhat arbitrary line past which all numbers seem equally large” (Definition here, original comments discussion here). The name comes from the book Watership Down, where the rabbits call all numbers greater than 4 “hrair”, and the original issue that sparked it was someone claiming that high school football coaches in Texas were making $5 million a year. When it was pointed out that number appeared to be closer to $120,000 a year, they seemed totally unphased. Both of those numbers were too much they explained, and therefore basically equal. Directionally correct, by today’s parlance.

Coming up with this term also led to one of my favorite puns, the “receding hrair line” which is when you act like a number is unfathomably large when it benefits you, but quite reasonable when it doesn’t.

I don’t know why I didn’t think of it at the time, but age is clearly the ultimate example of this. Some of this is clearly just human nature. I suspect all of us recall thinking a teacher was positively ancient when we were younger, only to age a bit and discover that they were actually 35 when we knew them. 70 seems old until you start having parents that age, at which point you realize that’s actually still quite young. We have a running joke at my work that the upper age limit for a transplant is our senior physicians age plus ten years. This also works in reverse, with new college students feeling impossibly old and worldly as opposed to high school students, and the rest of us not being able to tell them apart. I jest a bit here, but I remember feeling all of this myself. It’s part of aging.

Interestingly, this effect gets even worse if you start looking to the past. Someone who was 24 today would be apoplectic if you looked at them and said “well you know, it was really Gen Z who screwed up the housing market and the economy”, and rightfully so. And yet I routinely see people in Gen Z casually reference real estate/economic issues from 1960 and blame it on the Boomers. Well dear, guess how old Boomers were in 1960? And that’s the oldest Boomers (born 1946), that generation wouldn’t finish being born until 1964. There’s an argument of course that “Boomer” should not be taken literally and it just refers to “any old person”, but really, when would you be ok with being blamed for the economic conditions when you were 24? I think most of us, no matter our age would demand the correct people be blamed for things that happened when we were barely adults. It’s like saying millenials created the conditions that caused 9/11 or the 2008 crash or Boomers caused Vietnam or the greatest generation caused WWII, or Gen Z caused COVID. 60-70 years later it may all look about the same but if you were there it’s a pretty big difference.

For a more amusing take on this, I’m reminded of Chuck Klosterman’s book “But what if we’re wrong: thinking about the present as if it were the past“. I don’t necessarily recommend this book because the whole thing feels like smoking too much weed in a college dorm room, but he makes the point that we often collapse hundreds of years of history in to one or two data points, and some day people will do that with our era. Like all of the music of the entire 20th century may just end up being “the Beatles”, and the differences that seem so important to us now will be erased.

That being said, it’s good to remember that your perception of age will be changing throughout your life, in both directions. We tend to condense the memories of our 20s (“oh, everything just sort of works out eventually”) and forget the specifics, and we tend to totally underestimate phases of our lives we haven’t been through yet. We tend to collapse past eras in to one big mush while hyperanalyzing our own. It’s the hrair line: one, two, three, then everything else. It’s so second nature to us it didn’t even occur to me as an example when we first discussed it, but now that I’m thinking about it I think it might be the example. Interesting stuff.