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. You could just as well make a different case: that viewing yourself as younger is a form of optimism, rather than denialism.
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. Why we’re possessed of this urge to subtract is another matter. “It was just all these beautiful, smooth curves.” Rubin (75 in real life, 60 in his head), one of the paper’s authors and a psychology and neuroscience professor at Duke University.
“We ran this thing, and the data were gorgeous,” says David C. Many have their origins in the field of gerontology, designed primarily with an eye toward health outcomes, which means they ask participants how old they feel, which those participants generally take to mean how old do you feel physically, which then leads to the rather unsurprising conclusion that if you feel older, you probably are, in the sense that you’re aging faster.īut “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. (There’s a study for everything.) As one might also suspect, most of them are pretty unimaginative. Adults over 40 perceive themselves to be, on average, about 20 percent younger than their actual age.Īs one might suspect, there are studies that examine this phenomenon.
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. (High-school reunions can have this same confusing effect. 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. Yet we seem to have an awfully rough go of locating ourselves in time. Most of us also know where our bodies are in space, what physiologists call “proprioception.” We don’t think of ourselves as having smaller ears or longer noses or curlier hair. Certainly most of us don’t believe ourselves to be shorter or taller than we actually are.
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. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.
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