Those who have known [of] me for long enough may have heard me talk about my Three Ages Theory but I've never properly written it up as like, an essay, so this seems like a good prompt for that.
I believe that the measure of one's wisdom or maturity; or perhaps one's sense of being older or younger relative to another person; is not determined merely by a single unit called age, but by three types of age. Everyone has these three ages, although the third age is perhaps more relevant to some than to others. They are also all important and none of them override the others. They work holistically together to contribute to that sense of how old someone is.
First Age: Biological Age, Physical Development, Brain Development
This is incredibly important. While everyone's brains and bodies will develop at their own paces, they still ultimately are always the biological age they are. Someone who is 25 is ten years older than someone who is 15, and their brain will be more developed one way or another. This affects decision-making, it affects your physical capabilities, it affects your ability to make certain kinds of informed decisions, it affects how easy you are to manipulate or overpower physically. Biological age is incredibly important. And, also, simply having more years under your belt will give you some correlation to acquired wisdom and experience just from having more time to live and breathe and do and see things.
But you knew all this already. This isn't the part of the theory that's interesting.
Second Age: Life Stage
Where you are at in life has a major impact in how old you are, regardless of your biological age. If you are a college freshman, it doesn't matter if you are 18 or 21, you are a college freshman. You will be going through all the same experiences, all the same emotions, all the same pitfalls. 21-year-old freshmen look up to their 20-year-old upperclassmen even though those upperclassmen are, in-fact, younger than them physically.
And, indeed, those upperclassmen might be more mature, more experienced, functionally older than the freshmen who are, physically, older than them. Because where they are in life is more advanced. If you spent two years after high school working part-time while living with your suburban parents and then went to college, your experiences of living in the dorms your first year will be all the same as your 18-year-old classmates who went to college right away. You're still figuring things out at that same pace.
Likewise, this is why, if you're 27, someone who is 37 might feel closer in age than someone who is 21 and just finished college; even though the 21-year-old is absolutely closer in age to you. You've been a working adult for some years now and so has the 37-year-old. Your lives look more similar. You're at closer stages of your life. The 21-year-old, meanwhile, is still new and fresh and figuring out living in the outside world and holding down a full-time job for the first time. They still have a college mentality.
This is also why a 21-year-old who didn't go to college might feel tremendously older than someone who is 23 and did go to college. The 21-year-old, here, has been living independently and working a full-time job for four years now, while the 23-year-old has only been doing it for a couple years. Even if the 23-year-old has a degree and knows more about using JSTOR and Microsoft Powerpoint, their life stage is one where they are closer to only just figuring out this whole adulthood thing than the person who has been working and financially independent for longer.
This is also why, as you get older, in general you stop noticing age gaps as much. Less and less changes over time. At a certain point, a 35 year old and 45 year old are not in tremendously different stages of their life unless, perhaps, one of them is a parent. A 67 year old and an 85 year old are both retirees, their 18 year difference be damned.
This is also why you get this rich non-starters who never seem to mature at all. You'll meet these 38-year-olds living in apartments owned by their landlord parents working part-time jobs and indulging in geeky interests and just, don't seem to be their age. They still feel like they're in their early twenties. Because that's the stage of their life that they're in, because they never had to leave it.
Third Age: Years since starting transition/coming out as queer/self-actualizing?
This is the other thing that prompted the creation of this theory. Because sometimes I'm talking to a trans person who is ten years older than me but has been transitioning for eight years less than me and I just find myself thinking "I'm older than you and you should listen to my advice."
When you are wallowing in a haze of self-hatred, self-denial, living as someone you're not, you aren't really living your life, and you aren't gaining a lot of basic interpersonal skills and self-knowledge. When you finally come out, you become like a bright eyed high-schooler all over again. Sure, there's second-puberty for trans people, but it's also well-known the archetype of the 55-year-old man who finally leaves his wife and comes out as gay and begins to learn how to truly date and have sex for the first time, and men twenty years his junior will think "You are like a teenager. You are so young. You are so immature and you have so much to learn."
Many trans people often say that when they finally started to transition, it's when their life really began. Of course, then, they would be functionally younger.
I think that even cis het people have this, though perhaps for many of them it's so far in the negative they might never even turn one. I think that for them, this would be years in therapy, years since their first divorce, years since they changed careers and figured out what they truly want in life, when they figured out their nature and what truly makes them happy. This is the years since they joined that community of like-minded folks who finally get them. Years since their shroom trip on the mountains when they finally "found themselves." It's years since they finally stopped just living life on rails and started really coming into their own as a person who knows what they want in life.
The Cis+ and Straight+ people I think start their counter when they finish their deep introspection and determine that they're cis or straight through thinking about it instead of assuming it.
Conclusion
Also, experiencing stress a lot, like the hormone cortisol, legit ages you faster in terms of health detriment. So "Growing up too fast" not only mentally ages you too quickly it also makes your hair go gray quicker, your joints ache more quicker, etc.
so what I'm saying is when I say I'm twenty-redacted going on thirty-five it's perhaps more true than your think
