Act Your Age

People need to act their age. By that, I don't mean that people who are young should be relegated to the dustbin, nor that people who are older are better. Far from it. Acting your age doesn't have anything to do with your intelligence (well, maybe it does, but it doesn't improve it).

Acting your age has more to do with the company you keep than anything else, I suppose. If you are spending all your time hanging around with people significantly older or younger than you, out of your age bracket (and don't ask me to define that because I guess it's probably something which is rightly-resistant to definition) then there's a fair chance you should examine your circumstances. But it also has to do with mid-life crises of all stripes.

I am more annoyed at people who try to act younger than they are because I have been frequently put in situations where I had to act older than I was. And that's hard, so I have a certain amount of patience toward those in similar situations. Precocious is a tough cross to bear, and many people will unjustly label any younger person precocious simply because they believe that younger people aren't as smart. Since younger people frequently are as smart, or smarter, it's not fair. Also, elevating your status, age-wise, is hard on yourself and is usually in service of some goal other than making yourself feel good.

Acting younger is epidemic, and since I run into it so often I guess I have less patience with it. It's self-serving for the most part, and it doesn't require much sacrifice. And I'm not just talking about looking or talking younger. I'm talking about doing things which are immature, things which most mature people of the age you'd like to emulate don't do anyway because they have sense. I'm talking about pretense which goes beyond simply being in touch with youth and moves into acting in ways which hold a very distorted mirror to youth.

I could give examples but I won't. I will, however, share a quote which no doubt you've heard. "Children, there's a time and a place for everything, and it's called college." Many people wish they were in that mythical college, either because they feel restricted in youth, or because they long for youth again. The problem is that that college is a myth, mostly. And it only accepts people of a certain age. If you try to get in before or after, you just wind up looking foolish (that is, if you're lucky; you can also wind up acting foolish, which is infinitely more dangerous).

Stop the nostalgia. Maturity isn't all that bad. And you don't have to pretend to be back in college to be immature. There are lots of age-appropriate methods for that. I know this comment is addressed mostly at the older folks, but that's to whom I was talking all along, wasn't it?