If you're into this kind of work, I suggest spending an hour or so reading/looking through "Here" by Richard McGuire. It's a fascinating conceptual graphic novel that really gave me a new way of thinking about time. Even now, years after reading it, I find myself appreciating the history of physical spaces, even spending time to research buildings and different places I visit each day.

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/books/review/richard-m...

What the. I thought I recognized that book instantly upon seeing that preview of it and skimming the article, but the fact that it had been released only a few years ago made no sense to me--I was sure I'd seen previews of it something like 15 years ago, and then I suddenly remembered, vividly, how eerie it had seemed at the time, and I remembered being in this same house I'm in right now, looking at it online and feeling weirded out. But just now, after more reading, I found out the book is based on some earlier and similar black and white pages he'd drawn back in 1989 for Raw magazine, which must've been what I saw online 15 years ago.

So basically the last 10 minutes of my life have been super weird and totally appropriate in the context of that dude's work. Gaaah. Thanks for the link, and the bizarre meta experience I just had.

For another temporally interesting work, check out Meanwhile: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/meanwhile-interactive-comic/...

Not quite the same thing, but scratches a similar itch to "Here", I think.

Your comment reminded me of this quote:

"The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far back into the abyss of time; and whilst we listened with earnestness and admiration to the philosopher who was now unfolding to us the order and series of these wonderful events, we became sensible how much further reason may sometimes go than imagination may venture to follow"

This was Thomas Playfair commenting on the works of his friend James Hutton. Of course they were talking about deep geological time rather than human history, but the same sense of wonder is there.

NB I actually became interested in geology pretty much because it is history at an epic scale.

I get that vertigo personally when going thru any large city. Rows and rows of large habitations with thousands, hundreds of thousands of individuals makes me feel very humble at how difficult it is to grasp that degree of complexity when we just refer to it as "society".

I found the xkcd comic today especially fitting

https://xkcd.com/2013/

That comic made me lightheaded.

There's probably not a day I don't think about certain objects or aspects of life in the way depicted in the comment. E.g. I'm using a hammer which was once my great grandfather's, I suddenly think about the people who crafted the hammer, how probably all traces of them have completely vanised of the earth except a never-visited grave maybe or a picture in a drawer of which nobody knows who is on it. Or I'll think about the materials the hammer was made fro, once dug out of the earth and a tree cut down and how eventually it'll turn to the earth again, or maybe the steel gets recycled in the meantime, still, at one point all traces of it will be gone. Together with the rest of our lives. Doesn't get me lightheaded, but can be tiring at times and it's easy to slip into the 'life is utterly pointless' line of thought.

If that's the case, this one will make you faint: https://xkcd.com/505/

I think this is what 'sonder' is supposed to mean, but the purpose of that word is pretty much wholly to appear in Buzzfeed lists.

Not really, sonder is the realization that every other person alive today is living a life "as complex as one's own". The gp is about the number of lives in one spot through time.

They're sort of vertical slices vs. horizontal slices of the same concept.

The one that has hit me the hardest is imagining the Beringia tribes that moved to the americas in 15,000-11,000 BC. Living thousands of years in relative isolation from the world while living the same pattern of life from generation to generation.

I forget where I saw the story, but I once heard of a native tribe whose members made some money by making baskets to sell to tourists. The tourists would buy the baskets with the belief that this basket represented how the people of the tribe had lived thousands of years ago, the same pattern of living continuing over the whole time.

But the person who told the story talked to the basket makers, who were all trying to create new and distinct patterns of basket weaving, different and better than their teachers and their contemporaries.

The "same pattern of life" can be distinctly different, depending on the scale at which you look.

If that amount of time doesn't bedazzle you, then imagine that each person in the past could have taken different actions, leading to a tree of different possible realities. A huge tree.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation