Letter from the Editor #24
"Age Dysmorphia" got you down? Take Oldster Questionnaire Question #2 and call me in the morning...
Readers,
On Tuesday I had the pleasure of being interviewed on NPR’s Here & Now. It was a fun converstaion—I enjoyed talking all things Oldster Magazine with host Robin Young.
The interview brought another wave of new subscribers here. Welcome, newcomers! It’s good to have you here. Take a look around—there’s so much great stuff in the Oldster archive: interviews, personal essays, link roundups, more Letters from the Editor, and open-thread-forums.
For the uninitiated, Oldster operates exclusively on paid subscriptions, and pays essayists and interviewers. I’d love your help keeping this going, if you’re able. 🙏
Check out the rest of this series here. P.S. Typos happen. Please forgive me if you find any!
“Age Dysmorphia” got you down? Take Oldster Questionnaire Question #2 and call me in the morning.
I had a good laugh this week when I came upon an essay in British Vogue titled, “Why Do We All Have Age Dysmorphia Now?”
The author, Letty Cole, 28, laments a trend toward people living life according to their own schedules, rather than “following a well-trodden path—a predictable script that indicated exactly who we were supposed to be and at what stage…” She writes:
It seems we are suffering from a collective condition that I’m calling “age dysmorphia”: a strange dissonance between how old we feel, how old we actually are, and how old society expects us to act. It’s a dismantling of convention that feels both liberating and deeply disorientating, a hall of mirrors where the loss of collective identity is distorted by the illusion of freedom.
I suppose I found this essay funny because it seeks to pathologize something we actually celebrate here at Oldster—people breaking the rules around aging; rejecting old scripts about what they can and can’t do when; achieving things in their own time, often later in life than they were told they could.
It also touches on the topic of Question #2 in The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire:
Is there another age you associate with yourself in your mind? If so, what is it? And why, do you think?
It might be the most talked-about question out of all twenty, the one people most enjoy answering, because, as it turns out, a lot of them have at least one “internal” age that doesn’t correspond to their chronological one.
Listen, getting older is a wild ride. At each age, we’re the oldest we’ve ever been, and it’s strange new territory. It can be challenging for our self-concepts to catch up.
Question #2 also tends to elicit interesting responses. Among my favorites is poet/memoirist Maggie Smith’s:
In my new memoir, I describe people as nesting dolls. Inside each of us is all of the iterations that came before; inside present me is the person I was last year, and ten years ago, and even when I was a child…I try to honor and make space for all of the people I’ve been.
Ironically, when I added that question back in August, 2021, I suspected I was the only weirdo who experienced this sort of cognitive dissonance. I’ve since learned it applies to an awful lot of people—most of those who take the Questionnaire. And that those who identify as having another internal age (or three) tend to find the phenomenon fascinating and fun, almost like a super-power, not some unfortunate condition for which they require treatment.
The last time there was a major magazine article on this subject, the writer came at it from a more upbeat angle. In February of 2023, Jennifer Senior wrote a piece for The Atlantic titled, “The Puzzling Gap Between How Old You Are and How Old You Think You Are: There are good reasons you always feel 20 percent younger than your actual age.” Senior quoted me in the piece, and linked to Oldster. I felt validated.
I thought it might be fun to toss out Question #2 to all of you. (I’m throwing in Question #1 first, because we need it for context.) So, have at it:
How old are you? Is there another age you associate with yourself in your mind? If so, what is it? And why, do you think?
I’ll leave you with a spirited Questionnaire from the archive, that of Ammi Kohn, who was approaching 90 when he gave his responses almost three years ago:
Tomorrow I’ll share the second installment of “What I Did For Love,” a series I launched around Valentine’s Day. In the meantime, in case you missed it, check out the first installment, an essay by Oldster contributor and New Yorker cartoonist Carolita Johnson.
That’s all I’ve got today. Thanks as always for reading, and for all your support. 🙏💝
-Sari
My age is none of my business. - Dwight Lee Wolter
I am 67. At 62, I was honored to take the Oldster quiz and I proclaimed myself 13, but I think I’m about 23 now in the sense that — I have been trying to open myself up to the idea that anything can happen at any time — and what if it were wonderful? It doesn’t matter if it’s _likely_ to be wonderful, it matters only to be reminded that it _could_ be wonderful. Just because I have (by actuarial standards) less life in front of me doesn’t mean it can’t be full of surprises and wonder. You’ll have to trust me, my past year actually bears that out.