What's my age again?
Anchoring, Seinfeld, and reality in reverse
Been watching some Seinfeld episodes lately, an every-once-in-a-while-return to the halcyon days of 90s comedy.
What strikes me each and every time I watch is how “old” the characters look. These versions of people I never knew and yet knew all too well.
They were older, not wiser, and to a teenage version of me, represented an adult world I would likely only kind of know one day.
In Season 4, we got “The Contest,” a groundbreaking 30 minutes in which the group makes a bet to determine who is truly the Master of their Domain. The going-for-self-celibacy group is Jerry Seinfeld (38), Julia Louis-Dreyfus (31), Jason Alexander (33), and Michael Richards (43), embarking on the unthinkable at the time, to hilarious results.
Besides my parents and teachers, these were the oldest people I “interacted” with on a week-in, week-out basis, meaning concepts around adulthood were mostly grounded in their exploits.
They weren’t role models (like, at all), but they were “old.” That’s why, when I rewatch the show all these decades later, the core group comes off as “old,” even though, as I just laid out, they were mostly a decade or so younger than me right now.
Perceptual anchoring is what happens when we lock certain people’s (say, television character’s) age in place while we continue to age around and past them. The relation to a younger version of ourselves is so strong (some from nostalgia, some from being overly impressionable, some from being like, “whoa, what are they doing in this ep!?!) that it’s nearly impossible to undo even years later.
Those characters are frozen in time. Forever.
And yet, this great world spins as years pass. Everyone gets a little longer in the tooth, with all of us aging on our own slow-but-fast terms. When I’m 75, I’ll probably look at the gang sitting in the coffee shop and think they look like older-than-me adults. It’s weird as hell.
Age is funny. I suspect many of us don’t feel old in the general or even literal sense of the word, even if you’re like me, and limp when you get up, can’t bend fully over 100% of the time, and give yourself heatstroke, staying in the shower too long (yup, that happened, twice).
But it’s a sobering feeling waking up one day and figuring out we’re older now than the old people we remember from our formative years. Maybe you don’t remember the exact moment it happened. Just one day, with bone-crushing clarity, we realize we are, in fact, older than the adults we once considered on the far edge of the acceptable age curve.
I don’t like the feeling.
I also don’t dislike the feeling.
What it conjures is a somewhat sickening, somewhat surreal moment of distinction; we have passed a kind of fuzzy dividing line, a point of no return.
And I know what some of you are probably out there saying. Doug, you devilishly handsome devil, “You are only as old as you feel.”
First off. Fuck off.
Second. I know you’re right, and I’m sorry for telling you to fuck off. Apologies. It’s the old, cranky man in me talking.
If I’m retroactively age-anchored to fake characters on the television screen, then I should be working harder on the anchoring itself and choosing new touchpoints. Rescrambling my brain to identify ways to feel more in line with my actual age, if that’s even possible. Or even better, just start to feel younger in any way possible.
Like, jeez, there are times when I can’t even figure out where I stand age-wise, thinking I’d pass just fine in a 21 Jump Street-like high school undercover thing. This is maybe the early onset dementia talking.
Because there’s another weird thing I’ve noticed lately, one that makes the age piece even harder a circle to square. When looking back at pictures of myself from, say, 20 years ago, a time when I was an adult but maybe not fully “responsible” yet (i.e., I didn’t have kids), I get an aging effect there, too. But it’s different.
The young adult version of me then seems older than the version of me now.
Some of it could be because the styles aged somewhat poorly, and the cameras were way shittier. Maybe it’s insane levels of age coping. But I don’t think that’s the whole story.
I think this lens isn’t all that different than the one watching Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer years ago. In fact, it might be the same phenomenon, just in reverse.
That late 20s version of me felt older then than I do now and could see a linear path to middle age without necessarily being afraid of the future. I’d reached close to the age of the characters I’d watched on television. Making me, by those standards, old.
By the very same standards I saw and still see the Seinfeld crew as old, I’m weirdly doing the same to myself now in retrospect.
So, where does this version of me stand at present? Well, we’ve got a different story playing out. Now, being on the cusp of actual legit old (with the gray beard to prove it), the world looks different. It is less spread out and less wide open. We aren’t going undercover anywhere, folks.
And so now, I find myself anchoring back to a younger version, or at least thinking that younger version is older than me. And in that way, I feel younger.
Am I talking in spirals? You bet. Time is that flat circle, after all. This could be just another example.
If nostalgia, adulthood, and age perception can use and then reuse the same lens to tell different stories, then maybe getting old isn’t the worst thing in the world. Or maybe it’s the only thing in the world we can actually count on.
So when I look in the mirror and see this old version of me looking back, it should bring a reflection of age on age’s own terms. Not tethered to anything else but the actual real-world version of the situation.
It’s terrifying and freeing, each in its own way. We’ll never be as young as we are right now. I’ll never feel younger than I do right now. I’ll never feel as old as I felt a moment ago. Both young and old at the same time.
The only anchor is the one we sit with.
And in that mirror, judging the actual age of the situation, there’s solace with one clear takeaway when I say, “At least I don’t look Jerry Seinfeld-in-1992 old. That would be a bit too much to take.”
Doug Norrie is the Boss and the Assistant to the Regional Manager of DN Creative, a writing agency working with creators and businesses to tell their stories.
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Living in a continuously young world this is a concept I ignored until a couple of years ago when I realized my son is almost as old as the teachers I was hiring.
I engage in personal challenges to check my age. Specifically letting my hair grow for a year to prove "I still have it". Or growing a beard once a year to check for gray (about 50%)
Love the stories. Keep them coming.