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By George Chesterton
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The late, great Prince once sang, "Act your age, mama, not your shoe size." It’s not my business to argue with His Purple Highness, but, as a person gets older, the line between behavior and the actual number that goes with it gets very blurred indeed.
In today’s culture, middle-aged people—and now the elderly—are encouraged to act "younger." They are often healthier and usually live longer (thanks, smoking bans!) than those of a similar age in the 1960s or even the 1980s. But is 50 really the new 30?
Social media is full of jokes about how decrepit the hairy or hairless 50-year-olds of yesteryear looked compared to their sculpted and groomed counterparts in 2026. Apparently, if you are middle-aged right now, you should either have the liquid physiology of an Olympic gymnast or be as debauched as the enforcer of a drunken biker gang. The worst thing a person in their sixth decade can do now is "act their age."
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"Age is just a number," apparently. We are told that "growing old disgracefully" is a virtue. And there is that slightly icky expression, "You’re as old as the woman you feel," or, in Madonna’s case, "You’re as old as the man you feel," which makes the 68-year-old Madge 38 years younger than what it says on her passport.
You are compelled to choose between looking younger and acting younger. Even if we can’t quite bring ourselves to get to the gym every day and even if our dreams of endless nightclubbing and Dionysian fantasies remain just that, the pressure not to act our age remains. You can wish away the best years of your life, angry with yourself that you are not fitter or more adventurous or more sociable. What you must not do, according to our culture, is accept the prison of your actual age. As we have been forced to agree, age is just a number.
But here’s where this all falls down. Age isn’t just a number. It is a whole list of numbers, which makes "acting your age" all but impossible (sorry, Prince). Your age—a bit like how we talk or how we dress—depends on the moment. How old are you when you go out with friends? I’d say for me that usually is somewhere in my late twenties. If I’m with close friends I’ve known all my life, I revert to the age we met, which means sometimes I’m 12, and sometimes I’m 18.
When I went to Disneyworld and Universal in Florida with my children, I felt 10 years old and giddier with immature excitement than they were.
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If you have particularly overbearing or annoying parents, you become a child again in their presence.
In the flush of middle-age romance—if you are lucky enough to experience such a thing—you revert to a love-struck teenager with all the wonderful, nervous thrills that come with it. A song can make you feel 15 again, whereas realizing most footballers were born after the year 2000 can make you feel like a fossil.
When your children misbehave, you become your parents at the age you misbehaved yourself, whatever that happened to be.
How old are you when you try to get out of bed? I’m more like a 70-year-old then, creaking and aching as I lift my legs on to the floor to the sound of clicking joints. And when you have a hangover, if you are still brave enough to drink, you can’t laugh it off like a hedonistic student but instead feel close to the moment of death itself.
The only time I can say with any certainty that I am acting my age is when I’m at work (please note, Newsweek bosses).
How can you act your age if you’ve never before been the age you are right here, right now? You are in a continuous state of becoming. And becoming a new person each day isn’t just one long march of progress into a better future. You zigzag through your memories and your perception of time, shape-shifting, adding something here and leaving behind something there.
It turns our age isn’t just a number. It’s lots of different numbers. All of them ultimately meaningless, which should be some comfort to Madonna.
George Chesterton is Newsweek’s Director, Publishing & Subscriber Strategy.
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