November 2016
November 2016
[Caption above the panel:] The November 2016 Guide to making people feel old [A chart with a list of items to be put into the two first lines above the chart. First there are a line using the first column, then there are two lines using the second column. Below those lines are the two columns with underlined captions above. Between the columns are a long line connecting the two.] If they're [age], you say: "Did you know [thing] has been around for the majority of your life?" Age Thing 16 Grand Theft Auto IV 17 Rickrolling 18 Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters 19 The Nintendo Wii 20 Twitter 21 The Xbox 360, xkcd 22 Chuck Norris Facts 23 Opportunity's Mars Exploration 24 Facebook 25 Gmail, Pirates of the Caribbean 26 In da Club 27 Firefly 28 The War in Afghanistan 29 The iPod 30 Shrek , Wikipedia 31 Those X-Men movies 32 The Sims 33 Autotuned hit songs
34 The Star Wars prequels 35 The Matrix 36 Pokémon Red&Blue 37 Netflix, Harry Potter , Google 38 Deep Blue's Victory 39 Tupac's Death 40 The last Calvin and Hobbes strip 41 Toy Story >41 [Don't worry, they've got this covered]

This is yet another comic designed to make people feel old , following soon after the last one 1745: Record Scratch . Not so long ago a comic with the very title of the largest bold letters in the caption above the panel was released: 1686: Feel Old . The next comic about feeling old, was released 11 months later, with a similar title, which is special in itself, 1898: October 2017 see more on both title and this follow up comic in the trivia section below.
Specifically this comic contains The November 2016 Guide to making people feel old . (The unusual title for the comic indicates that it only works during this month). It lists ages between 16 and 41 and links each age to one or more events that happened approximately half that age ago, so 8 years ago for the 16 years old and 20 years ago for the 40 years old etc, which means that a person of that age would have had the mentioned thing in their life for the majority of their life. And then it explains that to make a person of a given [age] feel old, look up the [thing] (or things) connected to it, and say:
"Did you know [thing] has been around for the majority of your life?"
As an example the age 21 can be used, as it list both the Xbox 360 as well as this comic, xkcd itself. The two possible sentences would then be:
"Did you know that the Xbox 360 has been around for the majority of your life?" "Did you know that xkcd has been around for the majority of your life?"
This matches earlier attempts to make people feel old by mentioning how long ago it was that, for instance, a movie comes out as was the case in 891: Movie Ages . (But on this exact day when the comic was released there might have many people who did already feel old and tired - see trivia ). When an event seems to have occurred recently to you, like seeing a movie when you were twenty (with Toy Story ) and then suddenly realizing that this was 21 years ago, you will very likely feel old. Since humans' perception of time is not related to how much time has actually passed but rather to important memories, then memories like seeing the first feature-length fully computer-animated movie ( Toy Story ) makes a big impression and may stay vivid in peoples' memories. When they then, after hearing the sentence from this comic, realize that more than half their life has passed since that event, they realize how much time has passed and that makes them feel old.
This is why it affects a 20-year-old to hear that Twitter is ten years old, where this will not have the same impact on a 16-year-old, since they were so young when it came out that they probably feel like it has been around for ever, and you do not feel old by hearing, for instance, something like that the TV was invented before you were born. It thus makes sense to pick something that happened almost midway through a person's life, because they then realize they are now double as old as when they first heard of Twitter. Of course also many ten years old would not have been active on Twitter when it was released, so it may not have that big an impact on those 20 years old today.
The joke at the end is that people over 41 don't need anything to make them feel old, because they already feel old. He thus teases people above 41 years old by claiming they are old, although many people (above 40) would claim you are not old before you retire. This trick was also used to cap the above mentioned 891: Movie Ages to 35 years old, stating anyone as older was already old. But that comic was also released five years ago, and now Randall is himself closing in on 35 at 32 years at the time of this comics release. So he pushed the limit 6 years further, probably for this reason. Now he no longer thinks people at 36 are too old to try to make them feel old.  It may be a coincidence, but still interesting, that he stopped the list just before 42, a number Randall has referred to many times in relation to it being the " Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything " in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy .
The title text points out that the same chart can be used for the same person once they are twice as old. So it urges the user to note down the age of the person it was used on, and then wait until their age reaches double that. So for a 16-year-old that would only be 16 more years until they are 32, but for a 41-year-old it would have to wait until they are 82 years old. When showing them this chart, they will realize that this has existed for half of their life and again have the same type of "feeling old" that this comic is supposed to instigate today.(It will work better if they still remember the joke made on them those many years ago)...
[Caption above the panel:] The November 2016 Guide to making people feel old [A chart with a list of items to be put into the two first lines above the chart. First there are a line using the first column, then there are two lines using the second column. Below those lines are the two columns with underlined captions above. Between the columns are a long line connecting the two.] If they're [age], you say: "Did you know [thing] has been around for the majority of your life?" Age Thing 16 Grand Theft Auto IV 17 Rickrolling 18 Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters 19 The Nintendo Wii 20 Twitter 21 The Xbox 360, xkcd 22 Chuck Norris Facts 23 Opportunity's Mars Exploration 24 Facebook 25 Gmail, Pirates of the Caribbean 26 In da Club 27 Firefly 28 The War in Afghanistan 29 The iPod 30 Shrek , Wikipedia 31 Those X-Men movies 32 The Sims 33 Autotuned hit songs
34 The Star Wars prequels 35 The Matrix 36 Pokémon Red&Blue 37 Netflix, Harry Potter , Google 38 Deep Blue's Victory 39 Tupac's Death 40 The last Calvin and Hobbes strip 41 Toy Story >41 [Don't worry, they've got this covered]
