What’s My Age Again?

As time flies by, I seem to be hurtling towards my 32nd birthday with increasing speed. While I was driving home the other day, What’s My Age Again by Blink 182 came on the radio and it got me thinking. There’s a line ‘Nobody loves you when you’re 23’ and I distinctly remember hearing that line being younger than 23 thinking it was a long way off, now I’m nearly ten years beyond that.

I’m only as old as I feel, and that changes on a daily basis

Age is a funny thing. They say you’re as old as you feel, some days I feel young and incapable of adulthood and others I feel tired and old like I’m beyond my finest years. In 2019, I can expect to live an average of around 84 years as a woman, in comparison in the Victorian era that could have been halved. In the 1200s in the UK I could be expected to already be dead with a life expectancy a little over 31. Only a few decades ago to reach 60 or 70 would seem a fair innings but now we consider this dying young especially with the raising national retirement age. Perspective on life expectancy has changed with many things not restricted to changes in health care, improved living conditions and better awareness of our health.

With all this in mind, it’s still not unusual to see people come into work who are younger than me, or even around my age. I think, for some reason, when I see 1987 on a date of birth it hits home the most. The sad truth is, people die at any age. An average comes with huge outliers in the statistics, those dying in childhood and those living beyond 100. It’s not something we know at all, as much as we don’t know how we will die we have no idea how old we will be. We never know how long is remaining on our lives, and I think wondering about it or knowing for a fact would only drive us insane.

If this has made you think, why not pop along to a Death Cafe? You can find your nearest at DeathCafe.com

My point in writing this was just to say one thing, while we obsess over age and how old we are, it does no good in helping us live our lives to the best they can be. Nothing can be truer of this than when people remind me that I’m in my thirties now so I should be prioritising having children if I want them because my ageing body is only getting worse at conceiving and carrying children as it slowly declines towards middle age. Remember that things just happen when they do. As a control freak I don’t like this, but it serves me much better to think it’s out of my control than to try and do anything about it. What I can control are my emotions around it, and try to not feel negatively regarding the fact.

MG x