We tend to see ourselves as a snapshot of a particular age. We forget that we are, in fact, all the ages we have ever been, and all the ages we have yet to be.
A few weeks back, a friend suggested we head out for a few drinks and see where the night takes us. A decade ago, I would have been the one suggesting it. This time, I heard myself say, "Mate, I can't do the late nights anymore."
I'm 35.
The words slipped out so casually that I didn't even register them at the time. It was only later that evening, sitting out on the patio with a beer, that I realized what I had said. When exactly did I start thinking of myself as old?
That little exchange came back to me when I re-read a quote from Jane Fonda this week that genuinely stopped me in my tracks. She recently said, "You can be really old at 60, and you can be really young at 85."
Now, I want to be upfront: I'm not 60. I am nowhere near 60. So in a sense, the quote isn't even aimed at someone like me. But the more I sat with it, the more I felt like it was something all of us, regardless of age, could stand to take on board.
Let me explain.
Most of us, somewhere along the way, start telling ourselves a story about getting older. For me, it crept in slowly. I noticed I was a little slower to recover from a heavy weekend. I started waking up at 6am whether I wanted to or not. I caught myself saying things like "back when I was younger" as if I had lived three lives already.
Bit by bit, without really thinking about it, I started behaving like someone who is old.
The thing is, I'm not. None of us in our thirties or forties are. Even the people in their sixties and seventies who I know are not, really, if you look at how they actually live.
I play golf with a a group of guys on a regular basis and last year we celebrated one of them turning seventy! We all had a few beers after a 5-hour round of golf. I was exhausted; he seemed totally fine. In fact, I left the bar before he did.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately because I seem to be surrounded by people who seem to defy the whole script. My golf buddy is just one example of many.
I'm not a doctor or a researcher, but I am a writer, and that means I tend to follow the trail when something catches my interest. So I went looking for evidence on whether mindset around aging actually matters.
It turns out Jane Fonda might really be onto something.
Yale psychologist and author Becca Levy led a study in which she surveyed 660 older Ohioans about their attitudes toward aging. What she found was striking. Her research showed that "older individuals with more positive self-perceptions of aging, measured up to 23 years earlier, lived 7.5 years longer than those with less positive self-perceptions of aging."
Read that again.
Seven and a half years.
I don't know about you but I think that's a meaningful chunk of someone's life.
Let me put that in plain terms. The way you talk to yourself about your age might literally be adding or taking years off your life.
I sat with that for a while, and it forced me to be honest about my own throwaway comment. When I essentially told my friend I was "too old" for a beer, I wasn't just turning down a chance to meet a friend. I was, in some small way, casting a vote against my future self. I was practicing being an old person at 35. Multiply that by enough small moments over enough years, and you start to see the problem.
I know there are limits, of course. We are not infinite. The body changes. Joints creak. Recovery takes longer. None of that is in dispute, and pretending otherwise would be silly.
But what Fonda and Levy are pointing to is something different. It's not about denying age. It's about not letting the number do the thinking for you. Most of what we call "feeling old" isn't really about the body. It is about the story we are telling ourselves.
I think about my friend's mom, who I meet every now and then. She's right in the age group we are talking about, and she is having none of it. She drinks champagne. She dances. She is the life of the party every single time. You would never sit across from her and think, "this is an old woman." She just doesn't carry herself that way, and as far as I can tell, she never has. Looking at her, I think that's the secret. She simply refuses to opt in to the script.
Compare that to people I have met over the years who started mentally checking out in their fifties. They decided learning was for the young. They stopped trying new things, stopped meeting new people, stopped imagining a future. They became old, and then their bodies followed.
We tend to see ourselves as a snapshot of a particular age. We forget that we are, in fact, all the ages we have ever been, and all the ages we have yet to be. The 35-year-old version of me is no more real than the 25-year-old, or the 55-year-old still to come. The danger is in writing any of those versions off too soon.
So here is what I'm taking from all of this.
When I catch myself making age the excuse, I am going to pause and ask whether that is really true or whether it is just a script I am rehearsing. When I think about whether to start something new, learn a new skill, or take on a new project, I will remind myself of those 7.5 years. And next time my friend asks, I am going to say yes to a few beers.
