"What Age Are You In Your Head?"

Self-perception from those who want to grow-up and those who don't

I got to spend a few days recently with my eight-year-old nephew while his older brother, ten, was on a school trip. Typically hilarious but laconic in the extreme, my younger nephew was now a bit more in the spotlight. I asked him how it was not having his big brother around. He responded immediately and in an unexpectedly full sentence: “It’s fine except that he’s not here to talk to all the adults for me.” I laughed. He wasn’t being rude. His response was an entirely accurate portrayal of his worldview, I’d just never heard him articulate it so deftly because, well, my older nephew is usually the one to do all the talking.

Back together again, a couple of weeks ago, I told my older nephew what his little brother had said. He laughed and gave me a wry look. Then, against the backdrop of holiday decor, the older one looking straight at me in a chair too big for him, the other with his legs over the arm of an identical chair, I asked them both about their feelings on adults in general. (The way that the younger one had said “adults” at the time—“he’s not here to talk to all the adults for me”—gave me a glimpse of what he thought about this group of humans.)

“How do you both feel about becoming an adult someday?” I asked them, together. “Great!” my tiny 10-year-old nephew responded. He elaborated easily that adulthood would give him the freedom he craved. My younger nephew, meanwhile, had groaned and made a grossed-out face. He may have even said “Gross.” I asked him a few more questions too and it was clear that for him, adulthood did not indicate freedom but, quite the contrary, it seems to be a place where freedom shrivels and dies, a kind of hell you never want to approach if it can be avoided.

Honestly, I think they both have a point.

These divergent views on adulthood are familiar to me. I wrote about them in Quarterlife as a frequent characteristic dividing Stability Types (older nephew) and Meaning Types (younger). Certainly, these two boys have had different experiences in their young lives, but they’ve also been raised by the same people, in the same homes, in the same neighborhoods, while attending the same schools. Their worldviews are aspects of their personalities more than anything, and probably also a result of their balancing of one another for the last eight years: the older one likes being the one to talk with adults and be in-the-know about all the news and gossip, so he plays it up and leans in; the younger one finds the whole thing rather boring and is happy to have a small human shield around him at all times.

In any case, this quirk of wanting to grow up or not grow up is fascinating to me, and I think it’s a timeless bit of psychology. Why do some young people view adulthood with eagerness while others view it with dread?

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Among The Atlantic’s most-read articles of 2023 was this exploration of “subjective age” by Jennifer Senior. It begins like this:

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.

I loved this article. It’s a simple exploration of another fascinating relationship that so many of us have with age, or what I might call inner age—another curious form of self-perception of which so many people are aware, and yet which we don’t often discuss. As much as people in the external world might be able to nail down our age with relative ease—especially people younger than us—our self-perception does not always line up with our biological age.

Why is that?

We’ve discovered a similar phenomenon for a variety of identity markers, gender among them. Race and ethnicity too. Our deeply experienced self-perception is not always aligned with the way we are perceived by others. This question of age, though, is less a point of political or social freedom than it is a curiosity, an interesting dinner table conversation. I think that it can also open up fascinating pathways to understanding an individual’s psychology, depending on the answer.

Senior cites a Danish study of 1,470 people which concludes “that adults over 40 perceive themselves to be, on average, about 20 percent younger than their actual age.” Then she shares her own experience of age, which drew attention to the under-40 set:

I felt 40 at 10, when the gossip and cliquishness of other little girls seemed not just cruel but dull; I felt 40 at 22, when I barely went to bars; I felt 40 at 25, when I started accumulating noncollege friends and realized I was partial to older people’s company. And when I turned 40, I was genuinely relieved, as if I’d finally achieved some kind of cosmic internal-external temporal alignment.

Same, girl.

I’ve sometimes described myself as aging backward. I’ve always felt older than I am, yet have gotten increasingly comfortable in my daily life and circumstances as each year passes. When I turned 40 last year, I felt a comforting alignment with myself, like two lenses that had always been a little off had finally come into focus. My inner age and my outer age were no longer out of sync.

And it made me think: if older adults so frequently perceive themselves as being younger than they are, do children just as frequently think of themselves as older than they are?

I asked my nephews this question and found it a bit harder to get a clear response—or even convey the intent of my question—than when inquiring with adults. It’s certainly an unusual inquiry. It may even reveal an oddity of adulthood itself or a vulnerability of their elders, that so many adults think of themselves as younger than they are. But ultimately, after a lot of contemplation and some larger discussion, each nephew provided an answer that seemed to strike them as accurate. The older one felt himself to be right about where he is, 10, though he contemplated feeling 400 and also 2 at times. The younger one, meanwhile, settled firmly on 14, an age that rather accurately mirrors elements of his personality, and which he feels is a perfect age: “not young anymore, but not old either.”

What’s your inner age and your biological age? Did you want to become an adult, or did you want to avoid adulthood for as long as possible?

Painting with a Green Center, 1913, Vasily Kandinsky; Art Institute Chicago