Every generation is modern while it is happening.

Nobody has ever lived in an old-fashioned time. Every period felt current, technologically advanced, and slightly overwhelming to the people inside it, who regarded their parents as dated and their tools as new. The quaintness is entirely retrospective. It is applied by people who will receive it in turn, without warning, from someone not yet born.

This is worth remembering both directions. It makes historical people less foreign, since they felt exactly as contemporary as you do. And it takes some of the weight off the current moment, which will look partial and strange soon enough regardless of how definitive it feels now.