I’m A Fossil, And That’s Okay

Our mind has a funny way of dealing with time — and the number of candles on your birthday cake doesn’t really mean much. Like this famous illustration below, there are two sides to the coin when it comes to facing the realities of ageing.

Measuring Your Brain’s Age

It’s difficult to determine when one truly becomes an adult. The things that supposedly make us ‘adults’ — bills, taxes, and back pain — aren’t good measures of how grown-up you are. Instead, a researcher has suggested that it might just be these nine concepts:

The Greenberger model has been used to measure personal growth and world-readiness for kids, but you can probably apply it to yourself as well. Me, I thought I was a grownup when I turned 18.

The week I turned 18 was when I thought I’d made it. I had a part-time job, which meant financial independence. I didn’t have a curfew anymore. And the crowning achievement — I got tickets to the latest Final Destination film without lying about my age, or parental supervision. This… is adulthood. Right?

Fast-forward to 2022. Three jobs, 5 years of paying income tax and one home purchase later, and I’ve never felt less like an adult in my life. These are the things that I’m supposed to be doing as an adult, and I feel like I’m under-aged and under-qualified.

And in essence, that’s how subjective ageing works — you’re only as old as you feel.

But here’s the interesting part: the illustration above is pretty accurate to how subjective ageing can affect your physical and emotional health. And it really boils down to one word: acceptance.

Embracing Old Age

In a study conducted by the University of Virginia, participants were asked what their desired age was — the age that they wanted to be. Participants over 30 mostly wished that they were younger, with an increasing degree of how much younger they wanted to be. People in their 30s mostly wanted to be 25 again. People in their 60s and beyond all wished that they were somewhere between the ages of 45 and 50.

Being younger has its benefits. Your body hurts less, and you might feel like you have more freedom and fewer responsibilities than wherever you are now. But life isn’t over when you grow older. In fact, you might even wish you had some of this ancient wisdom when looking back at some of the blunders of your youth. See below:

By the time you’ve reached your early 50s, you’ve probably seen, and heard enough to know what’s really bad, and what’s just a scratch in the grand scheme of things. Heck, even looking back at certain situations in my life now, I wonder what I was so worried about.

Great! How do we go about achieving this state of mind? I don’t want to be old and miserable.

In fact, I don’t want to be miserable, period. And there’s one thing that could actually help us unlock the benefits of ageing. It’s something that we’ve been doing since we were infants.

Play More, Age Less

Brb playing. The field of neoteny (retaining juvenile features into adulthood) suggests that there’s nothing wrong with ‘childish’ behaviour. In fact, it’s one of the things that makes humans human. Besides serving as a mode of learning when we’re young, the benefits of retaining playful characteristics well into our adulthood and old age is something that’s currently being studied. If play results in positive changes to your mental health, and positive changes to your mental health are associated with a lower subjective age and ultimately, healthier ageing, then… it follows that we should play more, right?

Here’s the Older Adult Playfulness scale:

And here’s a quote from the paper by researchers Careen Yarnal and Xinqi Qian, that I think is pretty rad:

“Playful older adults are happy, optimistic, cheerful, amusing, positive, enthusiastic, and relaxed. In everyday exchanges, they tend toward mischief, naughtiness, clowning, joking, and teasing; they embody fun and humor in ways that translate into laughter and amusement in others. Although impish, they are circumspect about their behavior in ways that teenagers have not yet mastered. Nevertheless, again, they continue to approach the world with a measure of creativity and whimsy.”

Don’t show this to my mum and dad. I’ll be getting pranked all the time and I will seriously lose my mind.

But in all honesty, I’d take pranks over my parents ageing poorly, anytime. And I wonder if I’d want to grow up to be like that too.

As much as I’m in a current existential crisis about my age and constantly questioning my credibility as a tax-paying, responsibility-having adult, I’m hopeful that on a big-picture scale, growing old might not be so bad after all.

It’s fine that I no longer can interact with the youth without them cringing — the authenticity and emotional growth that comes with age acceptance will be my new goal.