Throughout life you’ll hear the old cliché: age ain’t nothing but a number.
When you’re young, this really doesn’t hold a lot of meaning to you. Your life is usually following a semi-defined path and you’re usually hitting milestones at a certain points. Around eighteen you graduate high school. Then you go to college or get your first job. Getting older isn’t met with much dread. You’re usually excited to get older because you earn more rights with age.
Then you reach a point when aging is less exciting. Twenty-five isn’t quite as exciting as twenty-one. Hitting thirty can be marked with more sadness than excitement.
Once you reach a point where you legal rights aren’t dictated by the year you were born, you begin to wonder if age is really just a number. Why are people so upset when they age? And how does this impact you in the future?
Early Relationship With Age
If you ask me what I was doing at age 13, I’d tell you I was in the 7th grade. At age 16 I was a sophomore in high school and I took driver’s ed. My development was tied to my age, and I was following an expected path.
When we’re young, we generally don’t need to track our personal development. It’s defined by educational milestones, and perhaps some life events. People might remember the age they had their first kiss, got their first job, or met their best friends. All of these events are typical events in the lives of young people. While they are noteworthy, we also grew up in a society that places importance on your social development.
Social progress is accompanied by educational progress. If you ask someone what they should have accomplished by 18, you’ll get a lot of the same answers: high school graduation, college acceptance, or the beginning of a career. Ask 25 year olds the same question and the answers will start to vary more.
Age is closely associated with your position in life. As you get older, you start to have more options. This means there’s a less uniform path to success and people have less defined roles in society.
When Aging Loses Its Appeal
The older you get, the more options you have in life. You’re no longer forced to enroll in school or live under your parents’ roof. Many people continue down a path that has been predetermined. Perhaps their parents encouraged them to go to college, they have always known their desired career, or they defied the odds and married their high school sweetheart.
At this point, you associate less of your successes with age. You are comparing yourself to other people and allowing their successes to set the benchmark for your success. This shifts the dynamic as you assess your position in society. You’re no longer looking at where you ought to be. Rather, you are looking at who you want to be.
Age will still be a factor, but it’s not the only factor. You will start to find more commonalities with people beyond their ages, and you will compare yourself to people based on this. The comparisons include career interests, social circles, and family roles. It’s not uncommon to hear women compare themselves to the other women in their office, or to hear gym goers compare themselves to the other members of the gym.
Once you’ve begun to venture down paths in life independent of age, the importance of age becomes less significant. Then, it is a matter of determining what you value most in your relationships with others.
The Struggle to Break the Stigma
There are two main reasons we focus so much on age. Firstly, we’ve been raised to place and emphasis on it our whole lives. Secondly, it’s a predefined standard for us. If you know someone’s age, you’re going to pass a lot of judgements on them.
In most areas of life, age really doesn’t matter. The hard part is establishing a new standard to measure progress and success. For example, I often hear people saying they want to have children by the time they’re thirty. As they approach their third full decade without children, their standards begin to change. Now they want to have children after they own a home or once their partner is prepared.
No longer are they only comparing themselves to thirty-year-olds. They’re also comparing themselves to homeowners and first-time moms. Once a new standard is defined, age can just be a number. Until there are new standards of success, people tend to default to age.
The goal should be to focus more on the logistics of achieving success and not just our ages. Success will come with real preparation, not just a rush to achieve your goal by an arbitrary age. This is bound to put undo pressure on your life and lead to unneeded anxieties. If you change your standard of success, you have a better chance of reaching your goals and feeling satisfied with the results.
Can Age Just Be a Number?
To some degree, we will always be defined by age. It’s a lens society uses to view its people. Take a look at any statistic that’s quoted. They lump people into groups based upon age, therefore allowing age to continue to guide our lives. This isn’t completely baseless either. Take your health as an example. Age can tell us a lot, and this will allow you to get proper treatment.
In other areas, age only has the importance you place upon it. Your career might progress more slowly than your peers’, but that doesn’t make you a failure. The benchmarks you’ve established for your success are entirely subjective. There’s no test to determine you’ve graduated from one position and need to move to the next. Your priorities will be used to dictate your next move.
A lot of the time, age is just another way to compare yourself to others. If this feels more harmful than helpful, your should restructure your ideas of success. Everyone develops differently. The older you get, the less defined your progress needs to be. Choose what is important to you, and don’t let your age discourage your growth. In these cases, age is just a number. It only limits you if you want it to.