One of those disquieting reminders of the passage of time that seem to pop up with alarming frequency in your twenties is that you’ll start to notice celebrities being your age. On Instagram I learned of author R. F. Kuang, who just published her fourth novel, Babel, to-day. On a whim I looked her up and Google cheerily informed me that she was born in May 1996. 1996! She’s not a year older than I am! And she has four published novels to her name! How do you do that? I’m in my mid-twenties and I haven’t even a single novel, or any equivalent achievement, under my belt.

“You know what time it is,” my brain informed me.

“Brain,” I asked her, “what time is it?”

“It’s that time where you look up the Births section of the 1997 article on Wikipedia and start scrolling down from your birthday so you get to feel humbled by all the famous people who were born after you.”

So that’s precisely what we did.

Nobody born on precisely my birthday is notable enough to make it onto that page, which is kind of comforting, so far? April 15, 1997* is still unclaimed territory, and I guess I can treasure that fact before one of my birthday-mates becomes famous enough to stake it.

And then I scrolled down. CupcakKe, Kodak Black, Jorja Smith, H.E.R., Shannon Purser, Finneas O’Connell, Kylie Jenner, Bazzi, Jungkook, Naomi Osaka. All younger than me! Yeesh. Also Rebecca Black and Malala Yousafzai, but they became famous pretty early on, a decade ago, so I’m used to seeing their names on this list and they no longer induce that visceral shock that the other, more recent 1997-born celebrities do.

I remember the years when the 1997 births section of Wikipedia was strictly the realm of child actors and royal babies, and there were so few of them that the Wikipedia editors did not see a need to group them by month. Now there are singers and footballers and activists just like any other mature year. Maybe we’re a little deficient in writers and politicians and philosophers, but we’re respectable. Some of us even have death dates.

To think that there are people who were born after me, made their mark on the world, and died already! I should really get a move on.