It challenges how we think about "eras" by inventing one from whole cloth. In the end they are more arbitrary than it first seems. For example, the American "w

It challenges how we think about "eras" by inventing one from whole cloth. In the end they are more arbitrary than it first seems. For example, the American "wild west" period seems much larger and more distant than it actually was. (Mostly thanks to a glut of Hollywood movies about the period). It is quite possible to have slung a six-gun and driven cattle in the "old west" and still lived to witness the beginnings of the space race. I've found that this phenomenon effects me personally as well with the "formative years" of my late teens and early twenty's seeming to occupy a much larger place in my memory than chronology otherwise suggests. Makes one think.