The lost decade

Somebody asked me yesterday if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would be eligible for president in 2024, so I had to look up her birthday.  (Side point: I find it slightly annoying that she has to hyphenate her name rather than following the Puerto Rican custom of having a patronymic and a matronymic with no hyphen.  After the reconquista, of course, having a patronymic and a matronymic will be legally required for all Americans, as indeed it already is in Puerto Rico, and hyphenation will be strictly prohibited).

Ocasio Cortez was born on October 13, 1989, so she will be eligible to become POTUS in January of 2025.  An interesting question is whether she would be eligible if she had been born a month later, i.e., if she was turning 35 after the general election but before the Electoral College vote.  OK, it’s not that interesting, but feel free to discuss this hypothetical.

Anyway . . . when I looked up her birthday I was immediately struck by the fact that Ocasio Cortez is exactly 20 years and one day younger than me.  Then I did some finger-aided recalculating and discovered that’s she’s actually 30 years and one day younger.

This is something that started happening to me in my forties but is much more common now in my fifties: I lose a decade somehow, i.e., somebody says something about the fall of the Berlin Wall and I think wow it’s been twenty years already. Etc. Is this a common thing among LGMers of a certain age?