08/13/2025
New essay from my Substack:
All of my friends look like adult children to me. Not in a condescending way, but literally. When I see people I knew growing up, there's this weird visual glitch where my brain shows me a 9-year-old wearing a 40-year-old's responsibilities like an ill-fitting costume.
I can't help but think about this whenever I see those viral videos claiming that Millennials look younger than previous generations. Because here's the thing, I think I look 43 years old. I'm not delusional about my actual age or appearance. But I also simultaneously think I look young. Not younger than any other 43-year-olds, just like a baby wearing an old man costume…poorly.
This really only happens with people I knew as kids though. Everyone I've met as an adult looks exactly their age. Not old, but appropriately weathered by life's various indignities. They might “look” younger than me, but they “feel” like adults. But childhood friends? They're all frozen in time as tiny humans playing dress-up in adult clothes.
Turns out there's actual psychology behind this weirdness. Your brain basically takes a Polaroid of how people looked when you first met them, and that becomes their permanent headshot in your mental filing system. Even decades later, when you see your childhood friend with gray hair and crow's feet, there's still part of your brain confused by the fact that that your smile contains a mouth full of adult teeth.
This doesn't happen with people you meet as adults because your brain processes their current appearance as the baseline. There's no competing template of them as a 7-year-old clutching a a comic book, so they just look like the age they actually are.
The really wild part? This same mechanism explains why we think we look younger than we actually do. Most people consistently rate themselves as looking about 10-15% younger than their actual age, and that gap gets wider as we get older. Your self-image gets anchored to how you looked during what you define as your peak years (usually late teens to mid-twenties) and since you see yourself in the mirror daily, the changes happen so gradually that your brain never fully updates the template.
It's like having a really outdated profile picture that you keep meaning to change but somehow never do, except the profile picture is literally how you see yourself existing in the world.
But here's where my particular brand of neurosis kicks in. A few months ago, I caught myself in a storefront window reflection while walking downtown, and for a split second, I genuinely didn't recognize the person looking back at me. Not in some dramatic identity-crisis way, but more like when you hear your own voice on a recording and think "that can't possibly be what I sound like."
The guy in the reflection looked...tired. Not just "up all night with my sick-child" kind of tired, but "carries the weight of adult responsibilities and has a hip that makes noise while going down stairs" tired. He had lines around his eyes that I swear weren't there last week and the silver in my hair is slowly turning the tide as the dominant color in my beard.
And yet, when I think about how I look, I still picture the version of myself from about fifteen years ago. The one who could eat pizza at midnight without consequences and who didn’t have knees that for some reason hurt more in the morning than they do at night.
This gets even weirder when you throw social media into the mix. We're all walking around with these carefully curated digital versions of ourselves. Our profile pictures are the most flattering angles, our posts only capture our wittiest moments, and our stories frame our lives as more interesting than the reality of arguing over where we want to go out to dinner before settling on one of the same three restaurants we always go to.
Instagram and Facebook specifically have become these elaborate time machines where we can present the version of ourselves that matches our internal self-image. That profile picture from 2019 when the lighting was perfect and you'd just gotten a good haircut? Yeah, that's staying until the heat death of the universe, because that's obviously what you actually look like at all times.
Meanwhile, we're scrolling through everyone else's carefully constructed highlight reels and somehow surprised that our elementary school friends look "so young" in their posts. Of course they do. They're using the same mental photoshop we are, showing us the version of themselves that matches how they feel inside rather than what they see in their bathroom mirror at 6 AM.
Maybe there's something comforting about this psychological quirk. In a world where everything feels like it's changing too fast, where the news cycle moves at the speed of anxiety and social media reminds us daily that time is passing and opportunities are fleeting, maybe our brains are doing us a favor by preserving these mental snapshots that had no concept of mortgages or health insurance or the particular exhaustion that comes from figuring out driving their kids to their various activities every day after school. There's something beautiful about that preservation, even if it's completely divorced from reality.
The problem comes when we start making decisions based on these outdated mental images. When we act like we're still 25 while our bodies are very clearly sending us strongly-worded memos that we are absolutely not. When we expect others to see us the way we see ourselves and get angry when we ask the internet “How old do I look?!” And their response doesn’t match up with the 25-year-old version of yourself you still see in the mirror or behind the tiktok filters laid over your video.
The thing that gets me is how absurd this all sounds when you say it out loud (which, by the way, is something I’ve really loved learning from therapy). Sometimes you don't realize how ridiculous the things going on in your head are until you hear yourself actually saying them to another human being.
I'm walking around thinking I look basically the same as I did ten years ago, while simultaneously looking at my high school classmates and thinking they're all somehow frozen in time as teenagers. Meanwhile, strangers I meet see me exactly as I am: a middle-aged guy, with a belly, who spend more time reminiscing about the world before the internet more than he'd like to admit and definitely makes sound effects when standing up from the couch.
It's like we're all living in our own personal time bubbles, convinced we've cracked the code on aging while everyone else has mysteriously figured out how to travel through time. The reality is that our brains are just really bad at updating our self-image, and really good at holding onto first impressions from decades ago.
At the end of the day, this is just another way our brains try to protect us from the relentless march of time. It's not malicious or pathological–it's just human. We're all walking around with these internal museums of preserved moments, these galleries of how people used to look and how we used to feel.
While it might be comforting to think we're all somehow exempt from aging, the math doesn't lie and it’s important that we recognize it for what it is. We're getting older, our friends are getting older, and that's not a failure of any kind, it's just what happens when you're lucky enough to keep living.
Maybe those viral videos are right. Maybe Millennials do look younger than previous generations. Not because we've discovered the fountain of youth, but because we're the first generation to collectively refuse to update our mental software. We're all walking around with the same confused expression we had in 1995, just with more responsibilities and significantly less hair.
So here I am, a 43-year-old man who thinks he looks like a baby in a costume, writing about how everyone from his childhood still looks 12 years old. My back hurts from sleeping wrong, my bones make noises, and I genuinely get excited about a good deal on paper towels. But in my head? I'm still that kid who assumed I'd have everything figured out when I grew up...I do not.
