How Old Are You in Your Head?

Thinking about what makes us lovable.

The writer Jennifer Senior asked her mother, “How old are you in your head?” Without missing a beat her mom said, “Forty-five.” Her birth certificate put her at 76.

Jennifer had carefully avoided asking a related question: “How old do you feel?” She didn’t want her mom to report her sense of physical health: How limber her joints are, how much energy she has, or how steady she feels on her feet. Neither was Jennifer wondering about how her mom reacted to her own reflection in the mirror. Like, “Who is that old person?”

Photo by Zachary Kadolph on Unsplash

Nope. The question was, “How old are you in your head?” And its aim was to get at what researchers call “subjective age.” The phrase refers to a sort of intuition we have about how old we are. David Robson explains it like this. “Imagine, for a moment, that you had no birth certificate and your age was simply based on the way you feel inside. How old would you say you are?”

You may not be surprised to hear that older people—fifty and above, say—tend to report a subjective age roughly twenty years shy of their chronological age. So, a sixty-something is likely to feel forty-something.

Equally interesting, in my view, is that younger people—especially in their teens and twenties—tend to show the inverse phenomenon. They feel older than the date on their driver’s license.

We know that the age gap experience occurs frequently. What researchers aren’t sure about is why. There are various hypotheses, and one of them seems to me to have profound significance for our spiritual lives.

Photo by Matt Bennett on Unsplash

Older people experience themselves as younger because younger people have more gas in their tank. They can still accomplish things, get things done, have an impact on the future. In other words, feeling younger correlates with feeling useful.

Similarly, young people view themselves as old because they want to be taken seriously. They reckon that their youth counts against them, prevents them from assuming positions of influence and importance. That is to say, they yearn to be perceived as useful.

I’m all for recognizing the worth of each person. And I’m convinced that leading a meaningful life involves making a contribution to the greater good according to your gifts and abilities. But connecting the idea of being useful to any person’s worth sends off warning bells for me.

Maybe that’s because I have a profoundly disabled granddaughter. Maybe it’s because I’m closer to mandatory retirement age for clergy than I am to my ordination date. Then again, I think it’s because of my commitment to the innate worth, the inherent dignity of each and every human being. And it’s because of the place that Jesus has in our life, whether we realize it or not.

Photo by Gary Meulemans on Unsplash

Let me put that another way. Being loved makes us valuable. And we don’t have to be useful to be lovable. Human beings are not commodities. We are the beloved children of God. And God loves us because God is God. Period.

It seems to me that this is one of the central messages of the story of Jesus’ baptism by Mark. When Jesus emerges from the waters of the Jordan, a voice from heaven says, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” (Mark 1:11)

God became a human being in order to tell us pretty much the same thing. You are the Beloved. Our challenge is that we live in a world that tells us that we have to earn it. To make ourselves lovable by being useful in some way. By being productive or entertaining or good looking or powerful.

Our spiritual work, then, is to put ourselves in a position to hear the voice from heaven. To hear the Spirit speaking from the depths of our own souls the words that change everything: you are the Beloved.

Ronald Rolheiser urges us to pray with open hearts and minds. To listen more than speak:

You must try to pray so that, in your prayer, you open yourself in such a way that sometime—perhaps not today, but sometime—you are able to hear God say to you, “I love you!” These words, addressed to you by God, are the most important words you will ever hear because, before you hear them, nothing is ever completely right with you, but after you hear them, something will be right in your life at a very deep level. (Ronald Rolheiser, Prayer: Our Deepest Longing)

Through no effort of my own, I’ve heard that “I love you.” It’s a grace thing. That’s not to say that I don’t sometimes feel lonely or anxious, uncertain or confused, sorrowful or weary. Sure I do! And at points I have to listen again, very carefully, to hear those words. Nevertheless, I experience my life within the horizon of that “I love you.”

So by now you might be asking, “How old are you in your head, Jake?”

As of this writing I’m chronologically sixty-six. And I’ve had a foretaste of eternal life in my relationship with Christ. So the question doesn’t quite make the same sense to me that it once might have.

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Bishop Reynolds Forum, St. Andrew’s, Sewanee, January 16, 202

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Speaker, Diocese of Iowa Clergy Conference, February 18-20, 2025

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