Why You Still Feel 25 Even Though You're Actually *mumble* SOMETHING

Your actual age and your subjective age are only in sync for the briefest of periods around your mid-twenties. Here's why we spend most of our lives in asynchronous age delusion.

Series of self portraits by Rembrandt.

No matter how old you get, there’s a part of you that never quite believes it. Most of us carry an “inner age” that stubbornly refuses to budge — usually somewhere around 25. I first noticed the gap in 2001, when I was 28 years old and starting my very first job as a student therapist in a large London sixth-form college. In nervous anticipation of seeing my first ever student I had read and re-read his file, forming a clear picture of him in my mind’s eye.

At the allotted hour he knocked on the door and I invited him in. Instead of the boy I had imagined, there stood a young man, perhaps six inches taller than I, complete with a moustache. Caught somewhat off guard I picked up his file to confirm his name - it was indeed him.

“But it says here,” I said, frantically pointing at his file, “that you were born in 1985?”

“That’s right, I’m 16,” he said, then rather archly, “It’s just as well you’re the counsellor, sir, and not the maths teacher.”

It hadn’t occurred to me to do the maths because it was inconceivable to me that 1985 was sufficiently long ago to produce a fully grown teenager. In a flash I came to realise that the music that defined my teens were for him, already oldies; the mix tapes we made, already antiques; and me, already “sir”. While I saw myself as a jumped-up graduate, he saw me as one of them – a fully-fledged grown up. I was not ready.

Varieties of experiences like these multiply as time marches forward. Mine included the moment I realised I was older than the new Superman (2006) ; the uncomprehending silence I got after dropping a Buffy the Vampire Slayer reference in a lecture to a room full of first-year university students; and the first time I went to see a doctor who was younger than I. We experience these nudges and reminders as uncanny because even though we know we’re getting older, there’s a big part of us that feels like we stopped aging somewhere along the way.

Leonardo DiCaprio is as surprised as you are that he doesn’t look like he’s just stepped off the deck of the Titanic.

That Leonardo DiCaprio recently disclosed that he feels 32 despite being 50 should come as a surprise to absolutely no one. If you’re honest with yourself, you’ve been weirded out ever since you noticed he no longer looked like he just stepped off the d Titanic. For some strange reason it seems odder that celebrities age rather than stay the same.

When we get to know a public figure in their prime, we continue to identify with them as they once were. As we watch them age, they seem to peel away from the essence of the version of them we’ve internalised. Watching celebrities age throws up a mirror to ourselves too, one in which we also see a gap between how old we feel and how old we actually are.

You will spend most of your life feeling out of alignment with your actual age

Up until our mid-twenties we tend to imagine ourselves as a little bit older than we are, and from our thirties we do the reverse. It’s only at around the quarter-life mark when we enter that sweet spot of synchrony where our chronological and perceptual age fleetingly inhabit the same time zone. Soon after, they part company again, and this time for good.

It seems kind of crazy that your actual and subjective age are in sync for such a brief period; that we spend most of our lives in asynchronous delusion feels like a cruel joke. So what is it about that quarter-life moment that pulls so strongly on our self-perception? There are numerous biological, evolutionary, and cultural reasons why this is so, but the deeply personal experience of it is naturally driven by psychology.

Forever 25: Why you feel younger than you are

Once comfortably in to adulthood, why do people feel younger than they are? In short, your mid-twenties are the culmination of the two decades plus of growing, learning, and developing that preceded them. The final step, the development of your executive functioning, the cognitive skills that help you manage impulses, actions, and emotions, comes online in your early twenties. After more than 20 years in development, this final step is what neurologically marks your debut as a fully formed adult, the person you’ll come to know and identify with for the rest of your life.

How to grow older gracefully

This internalised image of yourself represents the essence of who you are, your spirit. And just like DiCaprio, it is likely to feel truer to you despite the version in the mirror that has more wrinkles and less hair. As the years increase and the gap between subjective and actual age increases, you must resist the compulsion to fight the inevitable. It’s a necessity that “youth is wasted on the young” because being too conscious of youth during youth would be ruinous to its cause. So don’t lament its passing or regret choices untaken. Instead, try to remain connected to the vitality of its spirit while connecting to the wisdom that comes with the passage of time.

What about you? Do you feel frozen in time at a certain age? Drop it in the comments — I bet most of you will say “around 25” (I’m actually 23). And if you enjoyed this piece, subscribe and share it with someone who still thinks they’re younger than the mirror suggests.

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Aaron Balick, PhD is a an international keynote speaker, psychotherapist, psyche writer for GQ, and author of The Psychodynamics of Social Networking connected-up instantaneous culture and the self; Keep Your Cool: How to deal with life’s worries and stress; and The Little Book of Calm: tame your anxiety, face your fears, and live free. He is an honorary senior lecturer at the Department for Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex.

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