Here’s maybe a fun question for today — how old are you in your head (vs your actual age, or how old you FEEL)?
I’m a few months away from a Milestone Birthday That Shall Not Be Named, and lately I’ve been thinking about the weird disconnect between how old you are and how old your brain seems to think you are. Apparently my brain has decided I’m in my early 40s… but it only recently updated the mental records from “mid-30s.”
There was a story in The Atlantic (gift link) a while ago about how you “always feel 20% younger.” Which… dang it, I just realized is true.
(Probably the only time this axiom is NOT true is teenagerhood… I know I felt like I was an older wiser 25 or so when I was 15, and that seems to be the way my surly teenager feels also.)
Some good excerpts from the article, including the intro:
This past Thanksgiving, I asked my mother how old she was in her head. She didn’t pause, didn’t look up, didn’t even ask me to repeat the question, which would have been natural, given that it was both syntactically awkward and a little odd. We were in my brother’s dining room, setting the table. My mother folded another napkin. “Forty-five,” she said.
She is 76.
(I just asked my parents, both 76 as well … my father said “late 50s but for the knees;” my mom said “old fart.”)
Personally, I totally agree with the person quoted in the article who said “whenever he looks in the mirror, he’s not so much unhappy with his appearance as startled by it—’as if there’s been some sort of error’”’ were his exact words.” That is EXACTLY it… a mental glitch.
A few years ago, I got pulled over while rushing to get my youngest to a pre-surgery COVID test (ear tubes, round 2). The cop ran my license and walked back to the car with a grin on his face: “You haven’t been stopped in 27 years — I’ll let you go.”
My immediate reaction was to argue with him because that was obviously impossible — I couldn’t possibly have been driving for 27 years. But we were late for an appointment, so I smiled, said “thank you,” and drove off.
Later I did the math and realized… @#$#$, he was right.
So I’m curious: How old are you in your head, and how old are you actually? And what are the moments that make you suddenly realize that your mental records may be a decade or two out of date?
Stock photo via Pexels / SHVETS production.
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