In a post about a book about The Beatles, Marklow writes:

When you ask a kid to imagine a world before television, what they will actually imagine is a world in which they can no longer watch television (how awful!), not a world in which nobody cares whether or not they can. But, of course, the latter was far closer to the case. We grant the past its dignity by not imagining that people lived in a world without this invention or that idea. They lived, like everyone, in the present, and the fact that their present has become our past is hardly their problem.

Indeed.

And tangentially, that reminded me of the way biological evolution is often discussed. In popular science books about evolution, there are interesting species and then there are "transitional" species. An interesting species is one that captures our imagination in some way: a T-Rex, a sabre-toothed tiger, a human. A transitional species is one that sits between two interesting species, it's one that starts to exhibit the characteristics that a subsequent interesting species will have as its hallmark. One of the most famous "transitional" species, archeopteryx, had wings and feathers, but it wasn't quite a bird yet. It was still mostly a dinosaur. Or, that's how it's always discussed.

Wiki:

These features make Archaeopteryx a clear candidate for a transitional fossil between dinosaurs and birds.[6][7] Thus, Archaeopteryx plays an important role, not only in the study of the origin of birds, but in the study of dinosaurs.

But, (granting them conscious self-reflection for the sake of argument) no archeopteryx ever thought of itself as being a transitional species in any way. Every archeopteryx that ever lived spent his life trying to be the best archeopteryx he could be, and not a one sat around aspiring to become a bird. It's only humans' need to turn evolution into a story, with certain species selected as plot points, that makes archeopteryx any more transitional that any other species. When you get right down to it, every species is transitional, in the long run.