Why studying History too hard gets you in a rabbit hole
- Haris T
- May 8, 2023
- 2 min read
This is a phenomenon that you can only ever achieve whilst studying the subject of History. I've searched far and wide and have yet to find writings on this phenomenon, however, I like to refer to it as a "time out". Time outs occur randomly and unexpectedly, yet when they occur, you'll be swept away. You know what I'm talking about right?
Picture this: It's late at night and you're engrossed in studying a particular period of history, whether it's for school or personal interest. As you study the time period and dive deeper and deeper, you start to form a bond with the people who inhabited it. You become invested in the lives of those who came before you. Be it the soldiers of WW1 or maybe JFK, his advisors or Albert Einstein or even the ordinaries in the background of a random picture from the past - maybe a picture of celebrations after the Berlin Wall collapsed in 1989? You steer off course and go down a never-ending rabbit hole of Google searches, typing in questions like "when did this event happen?" or "how long ago was that?" or "is X still alive?" and "when did Y die?". For some reason, you have the urge to associate and situate yourself in the same time line as those individuals of the past; "Are there any WW1 veterans still alive?" or perhaps "are there any Soviet leaders still alive?". No word of an exaggeration, I did this once... it was the day before Gorbachev's passing. You then switch over to the "images" section on google and get lost in a myriad of places and faces of the past.
As you look deeper into the image, you see someone that is no different to you, someone with the same facial features and same dress code as potentially anybody living today. Yet the thought arises that whoever was in that photo has been long gone for generations, although still looks cheerfully into your eyes. It confuses the mind to a point of utter bewilderment. You could have been happy a moment ago, but now you suddenly feel reminiscent and begin missing someone or something from the past. You are suddenly overcome by a strange feeling of sadness and nostalgia. They're so alive? they look so lively? yet in reality at this very moment in time they are nothing more than bones in the soil. And at that very moment, you have timed out. You situate your life in the grand history of humanity. You ponder on the fact that billions of people have lived and died and history has pushed them to aside, forgetting their stories...sometimes forever. And in these moments, you acknowledge that one day you too would face the same fate. It is these moments that put our lives into perspective.
A Quick experiment
But hey, it might just be me who does this, so lets try something! Have a good look at the photos below, soak in the atmosphere, the people, the buildings, the posters and the faces. More than likely, every single living creature in the images you see below, are dead.
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