Isn't that (loosing yourself in the grand scheme of things) the whole point of the animation ? A bit like Power of Ten [1] and Scale of the Universe [2] but with time instead of space.
The problem with this one is that you actually don't lose yourself. Today remains highlighted and continues to occupy a pixel or two. Even the millennium vanishes next to epochs to preserve our bookmark on today. It's jarring, and completely ruined the effect for me.
I don't know what tzaman was saying exactly, but what I noticed was that "today" got down to one or two pixels pretty fast, while the larger and larger time periods were restricted to only another ~1000 pixels or so, so at some point you have to shift back to imagining the relative lengths of time in your head again, instead of seeing e.g. "today" as 1/30 of the month.
I'm not sure if it was intentional or not, but for me the most striking point was when it circled back to today. It was a reminder that in that grand scheme of things, there's some stuff you do control. Now, time to get that stuff I was planning to do done.
