If It's Tuesday, I Must Be 25

By Martha Beck
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Feeling older than your years? Younger than your years? Martha Beck has a bit of age-defying wizardry to help you rise (even soar) above time.

I feel about aging the way William Saroyan said he felt about death: Everybody has to do it, but I always believed an exception would be made in my case. I suspect you and I are alike that way. I've never met anyone whose "felt age" followed the same steady progression as her calendar age. Children who assume adult responsibilities (worrying about money, protecting siblings) feel old when they're young. Adults under threat feel like children. Almost all my middle-aged and elderly acquaintances, including me, feel about 25, unless we haven't had our coffee, in which case we feel 107.

The difference between calendar age and felt age is particularly drastic for us First World, 21st-century folk. In cultures without the medical and labor-saving technologies we enjoy, many 35-year-olds look as withered as most North Americans do at 70. In one century, we've added 28 years to our average life span—a change so rapid that our brains couldn't possibly have evolved to accommodate it. Perhaps this is why, starting in middle age, many people report feeling about 15 years younger than they are. As calendar age plods inexorably forward, felt age zips around like a hummingbird, hovering around certain time periods, zooming right past others, changing direction just when we get a bead on it. We virtually never feel our age, but thinking that we should can lead to disaster.