‘New research suggests age is a state of mind – quite literally...’
WHEN I was a teenager the most withering put-down that could be applied by those terrifying cool girls with crimped mullets and electric-blue eyeliner was: “Oh grow up!”
It was a confusing command. We’d only been on the planet for 14 years.
Even if some of us had made the trajectory from Sindy dolls to Simon Le Bon a little more slowly than others, how much more mature could we be at this tender age?
It was particularly baffling to me as I was never sure what age to act at 14.
My pubescent social life channelled the spirit of a cardigan-wearing spinster in an Anita Brookner novel.
Why spend Friday nights attempting to convince the bouncers on the door of Gingers nightclub in Pontypridd I was 18 when I could be home reading a nice George Eliot?
But did this mean I had arrested development? Or had I bypassed adolescence altogether and fasttracked straight to middle age?
Science now has the answer. New research suggests we are far too rigid in our definitions and age is a state of mind – quite literally.
Neuroscientists say the age at which we become adult is different for everyone.
Indeed, some don’t become fully grown up until they’re in their thirties, which will be slightly distressing news for all those parents who are starting to wonder if their millennial offspring will ever leave home.
As Professor Peter Jones, of Cambridge University, explained this week: “What we’re really saying is that to have a definition of when you move from childhood to adulthood looks increasingly absurd. It’s a much more nuanced transition that takes place over three decades. I guess systems like the education system, the health system and the legal system make it convenient for themselves
by having definitions.”
He added: “There isn’t a childhood and then an adulthood. People are on a pathway, they’re on a trajectory.”
There’s something quite comforting about that, isn’t there?
But just when you think the route to maturity is a relaxed and meandering trail, society will impose deadlines on growing up and start piling on the responsibilities.
So with these new findings in mind perhaps it’s time to revise our approach to some of those age-related
boundaries.
The Duke of Edinburgh has recently proved taking to the roads at a certain vintage can be a perilous activity, but what about those at the other end of the scale?
I’ve never understood why the driving age of 17 is a full year before all the other legal indicators of adulthood – voting, drinking, mortgages etc.
Being in charge of a machine that is a potential weapon of mass destruction requires more maturity than almost any other activity someone
in their late teens can engage in.
Something I’m reminded of almost every Sunday night on my journey back to Cardiff from visiting my father in the Rhondda as I’m carved up on the bypass road by the speeding boy racers of the Valleys.
Judging by their lack of caution behind the wheel, their path to adulthood is certainly a “much more nuanced transition that could take place over three decades.” I just hope they last that long.
Yet, if reappraising the definition of when we move from childhood to
adulthood makes us look at some activities with fresh alarm, it could also give a free pass to those we have previously deemed to be clinging to their youth in a rather mortifying fashion.
Older men on skateboards, for example.
And those who wear replica sports kit that reveals they have more of a party pack than a six pack.
Or those women who wear exactly the same clothes as their 15-year-old daughters and hold their hands, looking like a spooky twin.
Or anyone still on Snapchat over 30. Ditto Tinder. And any grown adults playing Fortnite 40 hours a week. Plus all those twentysomethings who will still only represent themselves on social media with a heavily filtered duckface selfie.
It’s all fine, everyone. Thanks to neuroscience you can be pop-cultural Peter and Petra Pans for as long as you like.
In fact, why don’t we ditch age altogether?
Gender fluidity is the big talking point of our time, but why can’t we identify as whatever age we want – despite what our biological body clocks say?
Flippant, moi? It’s not as bonkers as it may sound – particularly as we face the double whammy of the demographic time-bomb and a society that is ever more ageist and illequipped to deal with the fact that by 2050 the world will have more than two billion people over the age of 60.
There’s never been a better time to rethink our entire approach to growing up and getting old.
There was a headline in the iNewspaper this week that declared: “Move over millennials, we’re the perennials.”
It was pegged to a major reportcum-manifesto released this month by the polling company Ipso Mori in collaboration with the Centre for Ageing Better. I Googled and downloaded the report and it makes fascinating reading.
Gathering data from across the world, it presents a new designation of energetic older people – the perennials – that up-ends every stereotype we’ve ever heard about more mature generations.
Mori chief executive Ben Page outlined the power of the perennials in his introduction: “They are not slowing down but taking on new challenges, roles and responsibilities... They are not wilting in the autumnal years of their life. They are perennials. And, like their namesake in nature, they are hardy, with the ability to withstand change to their environment; they adapt; evolve and grow anew.”
The report is packed with facts and figures that shock and surprise.
On the shocking front, the data on how older people are represented in the media was hugely dispiriting.
They are effectively airbrushed out of popular culture – particularly women.
Take the film industry. An analysis of 2,000 Hollywood movies showed that women between the ages of 22 and 31 spoke 38% of all female dialogue, whereas women 65 and over get just 3% of lines.
Most advertising, meanwhile, features the under-40s, even though the over-40s spend most.
On the surprising front, the stats show there are more shared interests among the perennials, millennials and Gen Zs than we might think.
As someone who makes television and radio programmes, I spend a lot of time in meetings and presentations with other middle-aged producers fretting about how to capture the 16- 24-year-old audience.
Because, we are told, they are the digital generation leaving we dinosaurs with our traditional media platforms facing pop-cultural extinction.
Yet as the Mori data shows the generation gap is nowhere near as wide as we might suppose, which has significant implications for how we serve all our audiences as content providers.
Across the world, rates of internet use among older people have risen dramatically in the last decade.
Only slightly more young people aged 18 to 24 believe that “the internet is part of my life, I’d miss it terribly if it weren’t there” than those aged 64 and above – 89% versus 84%.
As the report says: “Older people have an appetite for digital and have started to generate their own content that speaks of what contemporary later life is like.”
It all comes down to perceptions of age rather than age itself.
Why should we be defined by a number?
If, like me, you were a middle-aged 14-year-old, there’s nothing stopping you channelling your inner teenager in middle age.
And now that the scientists say age really is a state of mind, should we really mind enough to get in a state about it – from youngsters struggling with society’s definitions of adulthood to old people battling ageist prejudice?
In the words of Billie Burke – the American actress famed for playing Glinda the Good Witch in the Wizard of Oz – “Age is of no importance unless you’re a cheese.”