The following excerpt is from an artile in the April 2023 Atlantic and was written by Jennifer Senior. Illustration above by Klaus Kremmerz.
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.
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. Adults over 40 perceive themselves to be, on average, about 20 percent younger than their actual age.
Editor’s Note: The full article is available by clicking on this link: I’m 53 years old. I’m 36 in my head. – The Atlantic
If you have trouble accessing the full article, contact Marilyn at mbellert@niu.edu, and she will help.
