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The gap between how old you are and how old you think you are

theatlantic.com

21–30 of 194 posts

Re: The gap between how old you are and how old you think you are

#21
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I miss having hobbies. Any side project I embark upon has an immediate cost to my marriage. As in my partner gets mad at me because I should be helping deal with the little ones.

Home improvement catch 22 - damned if the drywall goes unpatched, damned if I spend an hour driving to the hardware store and fixing it, away from the kids.

I never thought we would fight over who gets to mow the lawn. An hour of peace during the daytime!

Re: The gap between how old you are and how old you think you are

#22

I've felt about 22 for decades. Probably until my mid forties, I felt I was only about 19. That leads quite often to the situation where you are looking in shock at some elderly, bald person in the mirror while thinking "Who's that old bastard?". Or the sudden realisation "My God! I'm only two and a bit years off 80!" As the article says, there's a difference between the age you feel you are 'in your head' and the ag…

Categorising ideas as age specific makes sense. We think differently as we get older, our mind is slower, our ideas change. Categorising the body according to how 'old' it is or feels or looks also makes sense. Categorising consciousness in the same way makes no sense at all, consciousness feels the same from as soon as you are aware of it until the moment you are unaware of it (usually death). The confusion often arises in conflating consciousness with the body or the mind or both.

Re: The gap between how old you are and how old you think you are

#23
post #4

Does anyone ever feel older in their head than their body after their 20s?

Yes. I've long felt time pressure. It wasn't until I was thirty and finally working in the career I'd wanted to work in since I was about 10 or so that I felt just 30. And my mid 20s were a time when my body was in the best shape of my life; but I still felt as if time was passing too swiftly.

Re: The gap between how old you are and how old you think you are

#24
post #4

Does anyone ever feel older in their head than their body after their 20s?

I'm 59, and I've noticed cognitive changes as I've gotten older. Perhaps the biggest ones are: 1) How much distraction and interruption I can tolerate before I lose my flow. 2) How long it takes to get back into flow when picking up something I worked on months or years ago.

I was going to add 3) How long it takes to find something on my computer, but that might be a function of adding more stuff and never getting rid of anything. I don't think I was more organized as a kid, just there was less stuff to organize.

In terms of things like social attitudes, having kids go through high school and college age was a big "reset" button, because I kind of observed the world through their eyes and listened to their arguments. They're the ones who have to live with this ** after all.

Re: The gap between how old you are and how old you think you are

#25
This does not feel surprising to me. I think you mentally lock into the age where you really bloomed into your adult self. For many, that is their early 20s. For me, it is around 30 (I am in my 50s).

And then that perceived age very slowly drifts up, but still with considerable lag to “real” age.

Re: The gap between how old you are and how old you think you are

#26
post #4

Does anyone ever feel older in their head than their body after their 20s?

I lost my parents at age 20, and instantly felt 30 for the next 10 years- and the next 10 years after that.

One of the silver linings of losing parents so young is getting a genuine interest to not have that happen to you, so I've made my health a pretty important part of my life - enough so that I won't die in my 50's unless a freak accident happens. My body could be misplaced for a 30 year old, even if my face looks 40.

Re: The gap between how old you are and how old you think you are

#27
you can't know how it feels to be older than you are, you can only know how it looks. from that you're free to guess how it feels, but you're probably wrong.

me, i've felt 9 since i was 9. it's actually kind of weird, i remember waking up on the morning of my ninth birthday, and that's where my episodic memory begins. i have earlier memories, but they're outside of time.

Re: The gap between how old you are and how old you think you are

#29

I've felt about 22 for decades. Probably until my mid forties, I felt I was only about 19. That leads quite often to the situation where you are looking in shock at some elderly, bald person in the mirror while thinking "Who's that old bastard?". Or the sudden realisation "My God! I'm only two and a bit years off 80!" As the article says, there's a difference between the age you feel you are 'in your head' and the ag…

Same.

Once I started seriously considering retirement, admittedly a bit early-ish relative to the usual 65-70, the internal mental model of self has started to shift pretty dramatically, and the hypothetical "I have a lot of things i want to do" plans for the future now have the annotation "and a lot of them need to be done while I am still relatively young enough for them to be plausible."

That has honestly shifted the self-perception pretty dramatically. Or maybe I have the cause and effect reversed.

Re: The gap between how old you are and how old you think you are

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Home improvement catch 22 - damned if the drywall goes unpatched, damned if I spend an hour driving to the hardware store and fixing it, away from the kids.

I never thought we would fight over who gets to mow the lawn. An hour of peace during the daytime!

Ha! I have a rather large property, and I thoroughly enjoy putting on my headphones and hopping on the riding mower for three hours on a Saturday afternoon.
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