Subjective Ageing

The puzzling gap between how old you are and how old you think you are. There are good reasons you always feel 20 percent younger than your actual age.

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.

Why do so many people have an immediate, intuitive grasp of this highly abstract concept—“subjective age,” it’s called—when randomly presented with it? It’s bizarre, if you think about it. Certainly most of us don’t believe ourselves to be shorter or taller than we actually are. We don’t think of ourselves as having smaller ears or longer noses or curlier hair. Most of us also know where our bodies are in space, what physiologists call “proprioception.”

Yet we seem to have an awfully rough go of locating ourselves in time. A friend, nearing 60, recently told me that 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. (High-school reunions can have this same confusing effect. You look around at your lined and thickened classmates, wondering how they could have so violently capitulated to age; then you see photographs of yourself from that same event and realize: Oh.) The gulf between how old we are and how old we believe ourselves to be can often be measured in light-years—or at least a goodly number of old-fashioned Earth ones. (...)

But “How old do you feel?” is an altogether different question from “How old are you in your head?” The most inspired paper I read about subjective age, from 2006, asked this of its 1,470 participants—in a Danish population (Denmark being the kind of place where studies like these would happen)—and what the two authors discovered is that adults over 40 perceive themselves to be, on average, about 20 percent younger than their actual age. “We ran this thing, and the data were gorgeous,” says David C. Rubin (75 in real life, 60 in his head), one of the paper’s authors and a psychology and neuroscience professor at Duke University. “It was just all these beautiful, smooth curves.”

Why we’re possessed of this urge to subtract is another matter. Rubin and his co-author, Dorthe Berntsen, didn’t make it the focus of this particular paper, and the researchers who do often propose a crude, predictable answer—namely, that lots of people consider aging a catastrophe, which, while true, seems to tell only a fraction of the story. You could just as well make a different case: that viewing yourself as younger is a form of optimism, rather than denialism. It says that you envision many generative years ahead of you, that you will not be written off, that your future is not one long, dreary corridor of locked doors.

I think of my own numbers, for instance—which, though a slight departure from the Rubin-Berntsen rule, are still within a reasonable range (or so Rubin assures me). I’m 53 in real life but suspended at 36 in my head, and if I stop my brain from doing its usual Tilt-A-Whirl for long enough, I land on the same explanation: At 36, I knew the broad contours of my life, but hadn’t yet filled them in. I was professionally established, but still brimmed with potential. I was paired off with my husband, but not yet lost in the marshes of a long marriage (and, okay, not yet a tiresome fishwife). I was soon to be pregnant, but not yet a mother fretting about eating habits, screen habits, study habits, the brutal folkways of adolescents, the porn merchants of the internet.

I was not yet on the gray turnpike of middle age, in other words. (...)

Ian Leslie, the author of Conflicted and two other social-­science books (32 in his head, 51 in “boring old reality”), took a similar view to mine and Richard’s, but added an astute and humbling observation: Internally viewing yourself as substantially younger than you are can make for some serious social weirdness.

“30 year olds should be aware that for better or for worse, the 50 year old they’re talking to thinks they’re roughly the same age!” he wrote. “Was at a party over the summer where average was about 28 and I had to make a conscious effort to remember I wasn’t the same—they can tell of course, so it’s asymmetrical.”

Yes. They can tell. I’ve had this unsettling experience, seeing little difference between the 30-something before me and my 50-something self, when suddenly the 30-something will make a comment that betrays just how aware she is of the age gap between us, that this gap seems enormous, that in her eyes I may as well be Dame Judi Dench.

by Jennifer Senior, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Klaus Kremmerz
[ed. For me, it varies. Mostly around 45-55. But sometimes (say, where risk or self-control is involved) it's more like 17-21.]