A seventy year old man gets advised by a salsa instructor to act his age when he showed enthusiasm in joining evening salsa classes. A sixty year old mother gets chided by her daughter for wearing too glittery and revealing outfit for a cocktail party. People are often asked to act their age whenever they act immature according to societal norms. Act your age means doing what your age permits you to do or not to do things which your age doesn’t permit you to do.
And why do people don’t act their age? That’s because they don’t feel their age. A group of 500 people were asked how old they felt. 80% of them replied that they felt about 12 years younger than their actual age.
How old people feel in comparison with how old they actually are chronologically is called subjective age. A 65 year old woman from Japan says that she feels shocked every morning when she sees her image in mirror. “I wake up every morning as fresh as a flower and as chirpy as a bird. I totally forget that I ever aged. But of course mirror reminds me.”
Subjective age is a biopsychosocial marker of aging. Feeling younger predicts benefits of key developmental outcomes such as better physical and cognitive health, higher well being, greater stress resilience and lower mortality hazards. Subjective age is a very interesting phenomenon where young people up to 25 years feel older than their age and those over 25 feel younger as they grow older.
There are many reasons why people feel younger as they grow old. Life expectancy has increased remarkably from 55 years in 1920 to 75 years in 2023. Financial stability and availability of better medical resources helped in this increase in life expectancy. People have more money today which helps them maintain better standards of life. They have many things to do even after they retire and their love for life never ceases.
Independence gives a sense of being young. Feeling younger than your age could be a sign that your brain is healthy. People who feel younger engage in more physical and mental activities and lead more stimulating life. Feeling younger doesn’t mean they are frozen in a state of permanent immaturity. People with younger subjective age become less impulsive and less neurotic and yet they gain wisdom that comes with greater life experience.
Then raises the question that why does human brain makes itself believe that it’s younger than its chronological age? It can be explained with the concept of a positive defensive denial where brain tries to protect itself from negative societal stereotypes that are attached with old age.
As people age, the autonomy and independence enjoyed by them is often denied by the negative ageist attitudes of people surrounding them. Older people are portrayed as mentally feeble, frail and vulnerable people. These stereotypes are often reflected in everyday conversations.
Media plays its own role in portraying elder people as frail and unattractive. Developing wrinkles around your eyes in late forties is a natural phenomenon, but in anti aging cosmetic ads, it is depicted as an unnatural and ugly thing which should be vanished or hidden.
In an ad, on left side, they show a picture of woman with wrinkles around her eyes, sad with dull eyes and on the right side, after application of anti wrinkle cream, the face of woman is happy, glowing and the wrinkles have vanished. It’s not the wrinkles that causes sadness but the aging stereotypes that don’t allow women to have wrinkles and be happy too.
We come across general remarks like, ‘you want to try rock climbing? Aren’t you too old for that? Do they need to get married at this age? He died at 80, its o.k., he lived enough’ and so on. Aging stereotypes deny a person the basic right to live happy as long as they live. This is perpetuated throughout societies from governments to families, where they are prevented from making decisions about their finances, employment, family life and participation in community life.
The positive attributes’ of healthy life like being active, independent, and financially secure and being adventurous is linked only with young age. Aging stereotypes make elder people think that accepting their age would be like denying themselves the attributes of young age which they do have. So the mind tries to deny chronological age to justify being young, being fun and being full of life.
There is nothing wrong in accepting your age as long as that doesn’t make you prone to anxiety and depression associated with aging stereotypes and also there is nothing wrong in feeling younger as long as that makes you live a happy, and healthy life. One doesn’t need to say, ‘I am 85 but I still feel energetic and happy.’ It would be more apt to say, ‘I am 85 and I feel energetic and happy’. You don’t need to act your age, just act what you feel like and the world will adjust itself around it.