We are all running out of time.

On the realisation that age is just a number, not a measurement

One thing I get told very often is that I have a lot of time ahead of me. And believe me that if I say very often, I mean very often. I guess it’s one of those sentences that people say almost instinctively when they talk to students, or someone who is younger them, I don’t know. But it would be really nice if I at least got a penny for every time I hear that phrase.

So here’s the thing: at first, I wholeheartedly agreed. But the more people told me that I have ‘such a wonderful future’ ahead of me, and that ‘I have all the time in the world’, the more I began to question it; I’ve been breathing the oxygen out of this earth for 16 years now. That’s roughly 6000 days, and a little bit more. Six. thousand. days. What did I actually do in these years? Not necessarily nothing, but have I changed the world? Have I contributed to humanity? Hm.

Another thing I realised: there’s something people do before they tell me that I have plenty of time. They ask me about my age. Sometimes, they ask me how old I am before they even ask what my name is. And this got me thinking: Why is age such a big deal? Are we trying to draw conclusions from them — are the people asking me about my age already constructing a mental image of who I am, without actually getting to know me beforehand, solely based on when I was born?

And if so, why do we use our physical age to measure our knowledge and/or our experience? Because that’s quite often the case. We presume older people to be wise, and younger people to be immature. Sometimes, I do it too. And it’s partially justified, of course, it’s just simple math. If you lived longer, you had much more time to have experiences, to meet people, to do various things. The probability of an older person being mature is way higher than the probability of a child being mature. But we always have to keep in mind that age isn’t the only determinant here. The environment — access to information, social connections etc. — and your mental condition, like motivation or general mental health, can be just as much of an influence to the probability of being mature as your age. (Maturity can’t be properly measured, anyways.)

Sure, there’s this thing called mental age, which finds acknowledgment here and there. You can find out how old you mentally are by taking a couple of tests, but if you take a look at it:

It’s closely related to physical age. If one says they are mentally 30 years old, they think and do the same things as a physically 30-year-old would. But what does a physically 30-year-old do typically do? Can we really take a look at every behaviour and action of every person in the same age and filter out the most common ones? Can we really categorise people by their age? I don’t think we can categorise people by anything. Stereotypes exist, yes, but how many times have they been proven wrong? And how many times did they cause more trouble than clarity?

We need to stop categorising people by their age, or instantly attributing traits to them when they tell us how old they are. Maybe it’s so engraved in our minds that it’s something quite hard to get rid of, but it will most probably be beneficial for… well, everyone. If we started asking everyone individually what they are doing, instead of ignorantly presuming things, we’d learn how to really listen to people.

We also need to stop using our age as an excuse to lay back and say, ‘I still have time’, because how are you so sure that you do? We don’t have a 80-year-guarantee of life. Life is not a predetermined way that has already been paved for you. It might be if you’re a determinist, but even then — you don’t know where life is leading you. As long as time goes only in one direction, and as long as we have no access to the future, we can’t know when our life ends and thus can’t tell how much time we have left. (Which is also the reason why the term ‘mid-life crisis’ doesn’t make sense.)

Life’s filled with unexpected events, and the world is constantly changing. We might have a gut feeling that tomorrow might be the same as today, but it won’t be. We had the chance to live our lives yesterday, and we have the wonderful chance to live our lives right now. We need to take that chance and make the best out of it, as if we were running out of time. The number representing our age can only tell us how much time we have already spent — not how much time we have left.

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