Jennifer Senior: How Old Are You in Your Head?

Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I am Charlie Sykes. One of my favorite guests from a few months back. I’ve lost track of time, so I don’t know how many months it has been. Was Jennifer Senior, a Stafford, the Atlantic winner of the twenty twenty two Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing and she has a fantastic piece on subjective age in the April issue of the Atlantic.

And so because I’m kind of a lucky guy. Welcome back to the podcast, Jennifer.

Oh my god. I feel like the luckiest of gals. I hear my favorite, it’s kinda kinda thing is, god. When allowed to have favorites? Anyway, I love being interviewed by you, Charlie Sykes.

Well, thank you. I do. And I love your podcast.

Well, I you’re definitely allowed to say that because there’s a mixed opinion about all of this. So the last time you you and I were talking it was about your huge piece on Steve Bannon, which by the way, congratulations you just got nominated for a major award for this. You know, one of the things that that was interesting was that Steve Bannon kept texting you and emailing you. So, you know, any updates on what Steve Bannon is doing these days?

Yes. One of the sublime pleasures of my life is I have no updates. He has stopped texting me. I don’t know. I have no clue.

I mean, it lasted for a while. Until I think somebody whispered in his ear, you know, this piece was not all that flattering, and it stopped. I I think he was so used to being able to seduce journalists. And I I think I was unsiducible.

That’s odd. Yeah. Because journalists never read anything negative about him because they don’t mock him. They don’t see him as an American rep, butane. I

can tell you why.

Yeah, please. I

have a theory about this actually. And it was something that filled me with terror as I was writing about him. Everybody who had written about him before me could write reasonably what flattering things, but just write very neutrally about him and sleep the sleep of the righteous knowing that they were cultivating a source so that they could get all of the dirt on the Trump administration. I think I was the first person to write a big Longwell piece about him once he was in exile, you know, once he was just on his own. Michael Wolf continually used him as a source and did a brilliant job with it for his books.

But in terms of magazineing and stuff like that, this was the first one. And therefore, I didn’t need him to get to Trump. He was the end. He was it. And I was looking at his influence his sort of asymmetrical influence on a subset of the electorate, the kinds of people who might have, for example, shown up at the capital you know, in in in fur and, you know, with access and nooses.

And horns and

horns and horns Right. Yeah. A very dangerous form of cosplay. The normal

the normal way the Patriots would dress. Yeah.

Like Vikings. Yes. Of course. You know, Viking Ware. And so I think that may have been one of the reasons.

You know, I had to sort of do this new thing. I had to write about him as the only thing, not about him as a means to understanding trust. So

you’re awfully kind about Michael Wolf’s book, which I continue to think was one of the more cringe worthy things to come out of the resistance, but we’re

gonna have to agree to disagree.

Oh, really? Okay. Well, that’s so but Steve Bannon was a master at manipulating access journalism that he knew how to play reporters basically saying, look, I have a bone I can give you. And apparently, it worked for a while for him. Until all the arrests, the indictments, and the convictions and stuff?

Right. And so I guess that’s your beef. Yeah.

Just just those trivial things.

Those minor things.

So I I think I told

I was gonna say

Okay. So go ahead.

No. No. No. No. No.

Go ahead. Sorry. Again, it’s me, the Mathy Brooklyn girl, cutting off the polite mid Western or I do this every time.

You go. It’s funny because you’re the only person that thinks of me as a plague midwesterner, I think.

Really? I

see. I don’t think the midwesterners really is I think that we have dined out for a long time on this idea that midwesterners are nice, so there’s a Wisconsin, Minnesota nice And actually, it’s really not that true.

You’re Wisconsin nasty. Well, as

you should know, listening to the podcast, hey, listen, I I I told you before that my wife and I had a had a long drive to Southern Maryland over the weekend, and we spent the entire time talking about your article about why everybody thinks that they are younger than they really are. And I wanna get to that in in a moment.

Yeah. But

I I also wanna talk to you about a couple of other things you have written all of which are in creatively interesting John Federman’s depression. You have a very, very interesting insight into all that. But also, you wrote about the experience of having long COVID and you wrote a piece about the etiquette. What not to ask me about my long COVID? So I hope that I’m still sticking with the Midwest nice image by saying, How are you?

Oh, that’s a perfectly fine question. Oh, okay. Not are you getting better? Why are you not better yet as bad?

Exactly. The stress of responding to that question, because it’s a chronic disease. So I mean, just imagine looking at someone with a chronic disease and saying, are you getting better? You wouldn’t do it. And so how are you?

Is it a lovely question? And unfortunately, still on brand, Charlie, I still think you’re nice. As I wrote in the piece, I’m experiencing new symptoms again, and they’re driving me crazy. You know, I this week, it’s chest pain. I don’t know.

What are they about? You know, don’t Longwell,

you wrote on Twitter, and I wanted to ask you about this. Another phenomenon I find myself filtering a lot less of what I say these days because this state of awfulness may be how I spend the rest of my life. I’ve become Bill Murray In the bathtub and groundhog day, that toaster oven nestled under his arm. Yes.

I am many exits past giving a shout.

You you go on to tell a seriously unfiltered anecdote, but you get the idea of the point is, be gentle with us, don’t judge, don’t pity. Something gets all of us eventually and then you write about all of this. So I have to admit that I tested positive for COVID a couple of weeks ago. And it was pretty awful, but that was my fear because like you, I hadn’t paid any attention to it. You know, you you mentioned that before you got it, it was, like, not really on your something you thought about that you thought could happen to you.

No. Because you probably within your immediate don’t know anyone who has lack of it. I don’t have anyone in mind. No. You know, you discover people here and there who are one or two degrees removed.

The fact that you felt pretty awful is actually a very good sign. I didn’t feel awful. I was walking the dog to the reservoir, you know, I was up in Vermont the time. I was canoeing. I was hiking.

I was cooking. I was in fine shape. I barely got sick. And what my GPU, x GPU, should have realized knowing me, is that I’m immune compromised. He should have realized my body wasn’t putting up a fight.

Mhmm. And it was just having its way with me. It was just it lingered. You probably didn’t test positive her as long as I and my very bad symptoms started to appear on day ten, which is way outside the pax livid window and I was steered away from pixelated at any rate. I hope you were not.

I’m very bullish on it. I think people should take it.

I definitely did take it. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, in hindsight, it’s just bananas that I did not. I mean, there there’s no good reason why I get very upset with myself that I didn’t actually put my foot down, but of course, there’s all this pressure if you’re a woman and a woman of a certain age not to appear hysterical. And because I was fine, and was actually so pleased to have what seemed like a moral case given that I have, you know, this inability to fight disease.

I was proud of the fact that I was barely symptomatic, not recognizing that it was ominous. So, yeah, it’s no fun. It’s really changed my life in all kinds of ways. In fact, I think when you and I talked for the Bannon piece, I may have been silently sitting there positive. I can’t remember what day it was.

But I was doing podcast interviews around that time.

Oh, really? I

know I was talking to Andrew Sullivan the day that I talked positive. Yeah.

I remember meeting you at a at a conference and it was, like, the next week then

I got it there.

You got it there?

I got it there, and I think I got it. That conference was almost entirely outside, which is why I said yes. And then — Yeah. — my final event was in an unventilated windowless ballroom. And it was built around a story I had written and there was absolutely no way for me to decline or

Right. There is there is no way. No. So this is the kind of question I would not normally ask anyone except you’ve written about it. You you’ve written about shame resentment, depression, you wrote.

Can we talk about shame and resentment for a second? Those are overwhelming too. Speaking only for myself here, I feel that this was a worldwide test that I and I alone among my cohort managed to fail. Pretty much everyone I know got the Omocron variant of COVID and beat it in a matter of days. I didn’t When I learned that Joe Biden quickly got over his own case, I burst into tears, how did an octogenarian managed to do that while I’ve been suffering for seven and a half months.

I’m not proud of this. See, this is something I think doesn’t occur to people that And that was very honest of you to say that you felt bad for getting sick, which is obviously not your fault. Thank you. I mean, so you you understand that it’s it’s not a reasonable position, but this is the reality. This is what you go through in life.

It is the reality. And it’s there is still something kind of embarrassing. I mean, it’s whatever leftover there is about you know, people still on some level, maybe not consciously, but in some echoing back catherine of their mind, they think that if you are sick, it is your fault. You know, you’re out of shape. You didn’t you don’t eat well.

You’re and by the way, I was healthy. You know, and, yeah, I can’t exactly explain what the shame is associated with this. I know the resentment is overwhelming. Like, I remember in the early fall when it was to warm out, walking outside, and Brooklyn was just looming with people at cafes and street cafe, you know, eating and going to restaurants and going to bars and life had really resumed.

And

also I feel this whenever I go on a subway and everybody is not wearing a mask, I’m not angry at them for not wearing a mask and not protecting me. Like, I just wish I were one of them. My assumption about all of them And when I see everybody like this is I think, oh, they probably all already got COVID, know that they can beat it, know that it’s stank, know that it totally sucks, but that they were fine afterwards. And I don’t have that luxury. If I get COVID again, I will be so screwed.

And so I’m like the one with the giant mask on my face. And it hurts to walk, you know, because my head vibrates when I walk, and I feel every step in my head. And it’s gotten better now. There are medications I can take. And people don’t take it seriously either, which also makes me angry.

It makes me kind of curious. I mean, the unfiltered anecdote that I told was running into somebody who’s very high up on the mass set of the New York Times. He asked me how I was, and I said, I had Longwell COVID. And he said, is that the excuse that the Atlantic writers use whenever they are unproductive? And there’s really no way to prepare yourself for getting that kind of response.

Okay. So my midwestern, nice, unfiltered would be to say, fuck you.

So about four seconds later, I had that Esprita Escalier where I had, like, seven million things I wanted to say. And I think I haltingly said, you know, I produced thirty five thousand words of copy this year. I had two cover stories and I was the first person to do that since James Fellows in, like, nineteen ninety eight. You know? And I had done a third story on Steve Madden all within one calendar year was a couple of short pieces.

It was like, then he started back pedaling, you know, but he said, was this too soon? And I said, no. It was just too me. Know too soon. Like, too soon for what?

Like, yeah. Anyway, it was just it was Because

next month, it would have been okay. Right.

Right. Right. Right. Right. Right.

Yes. That’s right. Not not five. It would have been in finding because that, you know, but, like, how does that not fill you with shame and resentment? You know, and I’m sure that, like, there was some cognitive dissonance going because he saw me in an event, so he thought if I was well enough to go into an event, I must have been fine without recognizing that you know, I am held together with like duct tape and bubblegum and popsicle sticks and twine when I go to these events.

I am you know, taking gabapentin so that I am not feeling nerve pain. I am taking clonipin so that I am not dizzy because it dampens your mastibular system. I’m taking meloxicam so that, you know, I am — Right. — again, it reduces the inflammation in, you know, in your body. So, like, whatever pain is associated with inflammation.

I don’t have it. I’m on an industrial strength antidepressant so that I have some in the will to get out of bed. A couple of months later, it was determined that my blood pressure went through the roof every time I stood, which explains why I felt lousy whenever I stood. And so now I’m on two things to stabilize that. I mean, I now have the medicine cabinet of an eighty year old.

You know, and all these things, like make you FEEL A STRANGE FROM YOURSELF, YOU KNOW? I MEAN, IT’S TERRIBLE.

YOU’VE MENTIONED THE DEPRESSION, SOME OF THE BIOLOGY, SOME of it, that sense that everybody else was going on with their lives. Yep. And, obviously, I mean, very clearly, this gave you the perspective to write one of your more recent stories about John Federman. I mean, I I think it’s interesting your personal experience, how it dovetails with your journalism. You heard a very interesting piece John Federman and the performance of Wellness, the particular challenge of enduring depression as a public figure.

And I I thought it was remarkable how you’re just describing this one aspect that I think probably other people haven’t thought of because they don’t think of US senators or politicians as actual people, but the whole idea of that you’re always on, you’re always out there. You always have to perform. Right? They’re front stage performers when depression is an incredibly private thing. So give me your thoughts on on John Federman and what he is going through and how we ought to think about this.

That

was a really good segue into this action. Because, right, we were talking about my depression, and it did give me a window onto this. So when I was a, you know, a cub reporter, I was like, twenty four. I went to work for the Hill newspaper when it first started. So I was one of the eight bajillion people who was accredited to go run around the US capital and noticed immediately not just how porous it was, but how accessible senators and members of the Bulwark.

And that they always had to have their game phase on. They were always between committee meetings. They were always meeting with constituents. They were always being stopped in the hall, you know, in the elevator banks on the little subway system that just connects the Senate to the Capitol or the House of the Capitol. They are required to do all of these things back in district where they’re doing town hall meetings and they’re doing, you know, barbecues and they’re forced to wear, like, coffee hats and chef’s hats and flip pancakes and, you know, and and sit and read to school children.

They can never the great thing about watching Veep was that, you know, Selina was just always, like, you know, dropping the f bomb and saying the quiet parts out loud. And that’s what made it so satisfying is that, like, her game face was, like, you know, it would only dissolving. And when you are depressed, you just wanna either curl up in a ball or you want a chance to at least feel depressed and to not perform. And it takes extra effort to perform your wellness. You are constantly performing in the character of someone who’s high functioning.

And that is what John Fennerman has had to do. Setting aside the fact that, like, who wouldn’t be depressed if they’d had a stroke at fifty two or fifty three or however old he was when you had it. Mhmm. I mean, it’s depressing to be Longwell, and it’s isolating to be on well, particularly if you can’t communicate. But he has, in addition to all, that had to perform a certain level of well-being.

I think that we underestimate that. In public life. I mean, I think about how Joe Biden went when his son died. You know, that stuffed inside, tucked inside, this very public guy who was doing vice presidential things, was a man who was deeply suffering, you know, and couldn’t show it. And he would with Colbert, you know, which was fascinating.

Yeah. I can only relate in part to this not being a politician and basically living my life now in in my basement. You know, as I was reading your piece, I remembered a period right after my my mother died very very tragically how I had to go on with my life and it hit me very, very hard. And I had to go out I remember going out to a a dinner with people who’d been on a trip or something together, and I was really a bad choice by me, but to go out and and I had to perform exactly the way you were describing it. I look back on that as one of the most difficult exhausting things I have ever done.

And I can’t even imagine what it would have been like to do that every single day, day, after day, after day, after day, to put on that game phase, that that that that forward, you know, try to again, performing and interacting with people when all of this was going on inside. So that would be the only analogy that I could have. And that’s really one day. And John Federman and others have done this, you know, week after week, month after month after month. And and frankly, that never occurred to me.

That’s trained. Because I think a lot of people say, hey, you were just elected to the United States Senate. This is a great thing. How can you be depressed? Right?

I mean, this is like one of the, you know, like winning the lottery.

So my question for you listening to this incredibly poignant story. And it’s a big deal when your mother dies. It doesn’t matter if your mother is eighty or if your mother is, you know, forty. And my question is, what made you say yes to that invitation? Because I think people also feel a tremendous amount of pressure to, oh, I should start leading a normal life.

This will probably be good for me. You know, so something made you agree to go to that party when you may not have been ready. So now I wanna know what that was that was driving you.

It was a sense of of obligation. This is back in the day when I was on radio and the hosts would host a tour. And I I think it was I can’t even remember now. I think it was a tour of Italy. And so we had spent ten days together as a group and the, you know, we had to bonded together and this had happened before.

She died. And and they arranged for all of the people on the tour to get together, you know, and and I as the host. And I felt that it would have been a dereliction of duty not to have shown up. And and, of course, in retrospect, it’s like, no, everybody would have understood. You know?

And frankly, it wasn’t that important. But I but you feel that internal thing, I Okay. You’ve been doing this for ten days. Time to get back. Make sure that you know, you you fulfill your responsibilities.

And and that was very strong back then, but I still regard that as is a huge lapse in judgment. And again, as I said, it is only one day, one moment, and yet it’s so indelible. I’m not gonna remember it, so intensely sitting there going, what the hell am I doing here? This is just terrible. This is a terrible experience.

No. Go. Okay. So two things are driving out of me. Number one, your sense of self recrimination.

Right? Which you were saying, like, it is it weird that you feel shame and you’re angry at yourself for getting COVID when it’s not your fault? Like, it wasn’t your fault for saying yes to that. Yeah. But it is funny how we do that.

Second, So now imagine John Federman’s schedule, which is just packed cheek by jowl with unignorable things because he was elected by the taxpayers. He was elected by Pennsylvania to do a certain number. Right? Right. So whatever you had, like, multiply them by a coefficient like, one million — Yeah.

— and that’s a Senate schedule. Yeah.

Exactly. The

other if I can riff on this for a second, you know, this is something I always wanted to run by you in particular and your — Yeah. — amply provisioned brain. I had this theory for a very long time. About politics and about politicians. Which was that the kinds of politicians that do the best are the ones where there’s very little daylight between their front stage and their back stage personalities.

So you can always tell when somebody is a faker when they are very different off camera or off stage. Mhmm. You know, somebody like Mitt Romney seemed to be very different when he was off stage. Now he’s actually they’re much more in alignment. He says what he thinks.

But I think as a candidate, that was a problem for him. It was a huge problem for Bob Dole. Who was so estranged from his public personality that he referred to himself in the third person. You know, Bob Dole thinks this. Bob Dole would do this.

You know, like, as if Bob Dole was some other guy, you know, I would even have gone further and said that the ones who were the most successful were people who had kind of front stage personalities to begin with. So somebody like Bill Clinton or somebody like Ronald Reagan who they’re kind of the same people, whether it’s in the morning and they’re playing hearts. That would be Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan who came of age, like, in front of cameras and kind of just was always comfortable in front of an audience, they always were kind of polished even in their private moments. They did very, very, very Longwell. And the backstage personalities, like, who would be backstage even when they were out of public events, like John McCain.

Who would be angry and be kind of sarcastic and be kind of ironic, you could make it as a senator. And we liked those guys as senators. You know, Howard Dean, you know, rise, sarcastic, angry again.

Right. But

they couldn’t be presidential candidates. Ultimately, we wanted like people who, you know, could put on the mask and be more formal. And John Fennerman obviously got tired of his mask. Checked into Walter Reed and said, I can’t do the mask anymore. Okay.

But just in terms of presidential politics, I think we all agreed that the backstage personalities didn’t really work for us. Like, eventually, we had our romances with the Howard Dean’s and with the the McCain’s, but ultimately, we chose guys who were much more comfortable as French stage personalities. Until Donald Trump

I told I was gonna just say until Donald Trump Yeah.

And, like, so what happened? Like, my theory worked so well until Donald Trump, where we just had this potty mouth and this id and this angry gelatin. And

I think that that’s part of the larger transformation and it’s this was something that I I think Paul Ryan on in my interview with him sort of touched on that after twenty twelve, when when he had met Romney, were defeated and were surprised, and the base was was surprised. That the voters just decided they wanted a different kind of candidate. They wanted somebody who was going to be truckyland. They wanted somebody who was going to be, you know, punch the right people in the face. But but you’re right.

You know, Donald Trump inverts that whole thing. Remember we used to say, well, you know, you wanna have a beer with Bill Clinton. I mean, I don’t wanna have a beer with Donald Trump.

Ron DeSantis.

Right. As as you were saying, you know, the people with, you know, the the backstage personalities, there’s also another kind of politician that has been successful that I’ve noticed. People who basically don’t have a backstage personality?

That’s what I meant. I meant Bill Clinton. No.

But I mean, there’s literally nothing there. I mean, there are people who are like sociopaths. I mean, it’s like they’re one thing. There is no internal life. There is no shame.

They’re they’re a little bit pathological. They have no real conscience. They can become anything they want to become. And I don’t know which category is, but But then in twenty sixteen, we basically said, this guy is a complete total sociopath, but he’s our complete sociopath. Let’s go with him.

I don’t know. It’s a very interesting question.

But that would explain it. I mean, you’re almost saying that the categories are meaningless anymore. There is no front or backstage personality. There’s just some kind of raw pathology, and that’s what they so they are always the same no matter what.

Or let’s take a and then now I’m being getting personal. But I mean, you’re a Ted Cruz or a Josh Holly or anything. These guys are complete phoneies. Right? They’re obviously phoneies.

Right. So when they’re backstage, what are they? If you drill deep enough down into ten cruises, so what would you find? But

I think you’d find something actually.

Yeah. But what what would it be? I mean, would it be something shriveled? Would it be something crushed? Would it be somebody duct taped to a chair in the in the corner?

Who is the okay. So who is the little Troll who lives inside? Yeah. I mean, I think he’s an angry, you know, guy. He was a year behind me at school, and he made one of my friends cry.

That’s what I knew about Ted Cruz. I mean, he was ruthless, you know, he was hell bent on being rights? I don’t know. It’s a good question. I mean,

I’ve known a lot of politicians. You know, people say, well, what are they really like? And I can honestly say that I’ve looked into their eyes a couple of times and thought there’s nothing there. Yeah. I mean, this is it.

This is this is it.

Right. Right. Actually,

I have a picture here in my office, which I have turned upside down of me and Ted Cruz right before the Wisconsin primary in twenty sixteen where I, in a very misguided moment, decided that, hey, you know, Ted Cruz is the one guy that can stop Donald Trump. And so Let’s try that. And Jennifer, that didn’t work out well. That was just that was just not a good call. You

know what though? At the moment, I think it was reasonable. I mean, I don’t think there was any peyote involved. And and that idea. I don’t think you were tripping on anything.

Conspiracy theories. Paranormal. UFOs. During the entire nineteen seventy one debacle of this red die number two, parents all around America were buying Frank and Berry, so only a few days after the cereal was released, kids all across the country. Started being rushed to hospitals.

All of them had one symptom in common. Theories of the third mind on YouTube or wherever you listen. So, okay, I wanna turn to this other question which I have to admit I also find to be very, very, very personal, which is the puzzling gap between how old you are and how old you think you are. And it’s so true. So many people have, you know, an intuitive grasp of the concept of subjective age, you know, how old are you in your head, but just talk to me about these studies that you find to be credible, that basically, after a certain age, nobody thinks of themselves as being that age.

Like, I will be honest, it feels almost embarrassing to say, I am a certain age, and I don’t think of myself as that age? I mean, I I couldn’t remember talking to my mother when she was in her eighties and she said, you know, I don’t feel eighty. I feel feel like I’m in my forties or my my fifties and of course as a young person and deeply insensitive, I of course sneered at this and laughed at this and now I completely understand it. So why is it that people think they are younger than they really are? What is that about?

Yeah. No one has a great explanation for why. It’s very well documented that it exists. The best study I saw showed that if you are north of forty, you are on average going to shave about twenty percent off of your age in your head. So I don’t know how old you are.

How old are you in your head? Charlie Sykes should ask.

Somewhere in my forties. I I think that I’m comfortable thinking of myself as forty eight when in fact I’m sixty eight. Which by the way, I find shocking to say that number. I have to admit you, I find it shocking to say that I am sixty eight. It seems so completely Longwell,

it feels like an error. It feels like a system exact function or something. How

did this happen? Right.

How did this happen? And you were talking about, like, you you’re kind of sneering at your mother. Mistake that the young make, I think, is thinking that older people are ready to age or ready to die. Yeah. And was it Philip Larkin who referred to our existence as the million petaled flower of being here?

You know, I mean, we like being here. And, you know, when you’re eighty, there’s still like so many pedals left to go? I mean, remember my uncle when he was quite old looking at me and saying, Jenny, how much time do you need? And it was apropos of nothing. I had no idea what he meant.

And he was doing it deliberately. And I said, what? To do the dishes. I think he was doing the dishes. And he said, no.

How much time do you need here — Mhmm. — on earth to do all the things you wanna get done? And he said, because I figure I need about two hundred and fifty years. And this is, I think, the mistake people make. And another thing that you said about your mother, remember reminding me that once I wrote this piece, which had this unexpected viral life because as you said everybody intuitively has a grasp of this, very few people seem to think that they are the age that they are.

Right. I can’t tell you how many replies I got from people saying that when they took their mother and it was usually their mother to an assisted living facility, their mother would turn to them and say, please get me out of here. It’s filled with old people. It’s very disruptive to our self conception to see ourselves as exactly the h we are. Now, the studies that I’ve looked at are very crude.

You know, they all tend to say, oh, you know, it’s eagism. You know, people have internalized our cultures to finish, you know, with use. And I’m not honestly sure that I buy this. I mean, I think it’s true probably to some extent. And the best proof of that is that in Asia and in Africa, people are inclined to shave fewer years off of their life than we do in the west.

But you could also look at it as like a sign of optimism that, you know, you feel like you’re in your forties because when you were in your forties, you were in your professional spot and you felt like you had several pivots left in your life. And, you know, I feel the thirty six was when I would say, I knew what the contours were of my life. Mhmm. I hadn’t yet filled it in. I was still rooming the potential.

I was paired off with my husband. I was about to get pregnant and I knew we were gonna start a family, you know, but all that stuff was ahead. So it’s kind of that moment when potential and competence are an equiploys, but that’s not the only reason. I mean, there are lots of reasons that people say that they’re younger. Sometimes it’s because it’s for more poignant reasons.

They are people are sort of locked in at the age when something terrible happened to them. So they’re locked in at the age of a trauma. Or it’s when something transformative happened. They’re locked in at the age when they were sober. Or they had a terrible divorce and they are now the age that they were when they first got married because their mind is willing them to do a redo.

You know — Yeah. — the answers are very idiosyncratic as idiosyncratic as humans are. So, you know, you don’t get satisfying answers from social science, which is unfortunately, often the case. So So

you you asked the question on Twitter. Right? You asked the the question how old are you in your head? And what did people say? Yeah.

While I had Longwell COVID, I did this at a board of I mean, I wish I’d gotten the wealth of replies. I’ve gotten now where people have said all sorts of much more interesting things to me. Like one person I hypothesized, speaking to your earlier question, why do we do this? They pointed out that time speeds up as you get older because each year becomes an increasingly smaller fraction of your life. So it makes sense that you’re located somewhere, you know, further back.

And by the way, if you’re below the age of twenty five statistically, you probably are more likely to think that you’re older, not younger. That’s another thing I should bring up. But what do people say to me on Twitter? On Twitter, they said things to me like, I am thirty two because that’s the age my sister was when she died and I can’t be older than my sister. That was pointed.

Mhmm.

A lot of them said the same things to me that I had said that know, I’m the age that I was when I was at my most professionally competent but my life hadn’t truly begun. One person said the most amazing thing to me, but I just loved and I put it in the piece. He sent it in a private message to me. His name is Ian Leslie, and he’d written a number of social science books. And great stuff about the Beatles and Paul McCartney.

He said the problem was being a fifty something and thinking you are a thirty something. Is that when you are in a room full of thirty somethings and you are talking to them, you don’t think that you are any older than them. Mhmm. And it’s true, but they know that you are older. And I have had this experience so many times where I will be talking to a thirty something and I will be thinking that we are peers.

And then they will say something to me. I may as well be like, Dame Judy Dinch. I may as well be Maggie Smith in a room that you I mean, I like And by the way, I looked at Maggie Smith when I watched a room with a view recently. Mhmm. She was younger than me when she played, like, the old a dowager ant.

Maggie Smith has been playing dowagers for, like, thirty eight years. I mean, it is astonishing. And so maybe women, there’s some added thing where, you know, if we had our kids later and, you know, we I still have a teenager at home. Right? Like, I don’t know.

I can’t think of myself as being, like, the fifty three year old that my mom was, you know, where I was already thirty one that doesn’t scan for me.

I have my own theory on this, which I’ll share with you in in just a little while. I I also thought it was interesting that be right about the old souls who actually identify with older people that when you were at the age of ten you felt forty because you couldn’t stand the gossip and the clickishness of little girls that age. And this is one of the problems I have because I was very involved in things when I was a teenager and I was always I was the youngest reporter at The Milwaukee Journal. I was always the youngest of everything. And so there’s still part of me that thinks that that I am not the oldest person in the room.

I can’t get my head around that phenomena.

Totally get that.

Because I’d wanted to be older for so much of my life. But I’m

thinking of it the other way around, which is you were the Ron DeSantis you were the WonderKen, you’re gonna always think of yourself as the youngest person in the room. You were the extraordinary high achiever. When you were younger, you were precocious and saw yourself as older. And not only that, you were a wonder kind, I’m guessing, in your adolescence, Yeah. And our self impressions during adolescence and our experiences during adolescence have a privileged place in our memory whether it’s because we are awash in certain hormones or we don’t know if it’s for developmental reasons.

We’re not exactly sure why that is. But we have a super dense collection of memories from our adolescence. So if you are still highly identified with your adolescence self, which goes right up to the age of twenty five, frankly, that’s when the brain is still developing. Yeah, then it stands to reason Charlie Sykes that you would still think of yourself as the youngest guy in the room. I mean, that makes perfect sense to me.

Okay, so my wife has been quoting a line from your article for the last week, how you describe the prefrontal cortex of nineteen twenty year olds. What is the phrase you use?

They’re unripe bananas. A bunch of unripe bananas.

They are. Where did that come from.

I don’t know. My brain I mean, because they are because I’m living with a fifteen year old who thinks he can do all these things that he simply cannot. I adore my son. He’s wonderful. Then disconnect the gulf between what he believes he is capable of and what he can actually do is to me absolutely hilarious.

By the way, evolutionary kind of hypotheses about this. That, you know, you have to have this kind of outside sense of risk or at least take great pleasure and risk — Mhmm. — you know, in order to leave the family nest and go out on your own. So, I don’t know, a bunch of one rate bananas.

Un rate bananas. Okay. So, here’s my my thought. And believe it or not, I was not actually high when I came up with this. Okay?

Now if I’m having the discussion of, like, why, you know, we don’t feel our age, why it’s it comes as a shock to find out that I am sixty eight. And let me just test this theory on you. The the reason why I don’t think that I’m sixty eight and you don’t think you’re fifty three, is because we have spent our entire life being younger. Right. We have spent decades not being sixty eight.

We spent a whole decade being in our thirties. We spent a whole decade being in our forties. And suddenly, we’re in another country. So for example, if I move to Mozambique this week, I would not feel like I’m at home in Mozambique because I’ve spent my whole life not being in Mozambique. This is a bad analogy now.

Oh, it’s not. It’s perfect. Being the age you are now is a strange country that nothing has prepared you for. You’re in tire life you have been a young person and you were never told you would be this age and believed it. Let me put it that way.

And also you have all these memories as you’re pointing out. When you were in your thirties, from when you were in your forties, and those were probably very busy decades. You had your kids, your career was in full boom boom boom mode. Right? So you’re gonna have a lot of, like, really vivid material to pull from that’s going to help define you from those days.

And as you point out, you spent a lot more time in those years than you have wandering along in these years. And that also gets back to the other thing that I said, which is that every year is a smaller percentage of the, you know, of your life, the older you get. Right. So, yeah, those years felt longer and more substantial. I mean, do you remember how long a year felt when you were twenty two?

I mean, it felt internal.

Think about when you were in high well, how long those four years were compared to four years? Any any four years recently? Well, lately, it’s four actually, that that’s not true now because I think our politics is in dog years now.

You believe the word, like, in your three of the pandemic? I mean, it’s kind of bananas. I mean, that does not feel like three quarters of high school to me. It feels like they just declared a pandemic five minutes ago. I mean, as far as I’m concerned, Bill Clinton is still president and I’m surprised that the nineties weren’t, like, yesterday.

I mean, this is still a thing for me. I mean, my musical taste. I mean, I said this in my piece. You know, I’m slightly ashamed to admit this. But there’s far more to run to run on my iPhone than there ought to be in I mean, a crap in nineteen eighties van.

So this has occurred to me that that I am listening to music mainly from the nineteen sixties and that I am as far separated in time from when that music was made as pre World War one was before that music. I mean, the gap in time And that’s that’s hard to get your head around when you realize, okay, I’m listening to a piece of music that is sixty years old and was made in, you know, in the mid sixties. You go back sixty years before that and you’re like nineteen six. You know, were people in nineteen sixty five listening to music from nineteen o six? No.

I had this realization when I was watching war games with my son a few years ago. And he stuck with it, but all that I could think was, oh my god, this movie is as old to him as all of the Cary Grant movies were to me when I was his age. Like, And that’s the kind of thing, or you could do other thing, like, you know, the the first gulf war to kids now is, like, as far removed, as, like, the World War two was —

Exactly. — to

me when I was, like, you know, in elementary school. I mean, it’s just it’s bananas. It’s bananas. So, yes, for all these reasons, we can’t locate ourselves, I think, properly in time. In

just the last few minutes we have though, I I I love the your book where you’re talking about the global perspective, you know, that the that Asia has a smaller gap between chronological age and internal age. Africa has the smallest. Because unlike our culture, elders recorded more respect. There’s actually in Japan, there are new stands with Japanese cartoon books featuring older people falling in love. There’s a holiday called respect for the age of day.

People in their seventies and eighties lift weights and parks. I suppose there’s a little bit of that here. I don’t know whether it’s still true, but I I think there’s a certain age at which people in our country become invisible. And I think that’s part of that reality. Right?

Of course, when you’re older, you’re also in on the joke that you may be invisible to the twenty year olds, but you’re in on the joke that wait your turn’s comment

— Oh, for sure.

— there is that.

Right. But when you’re twenty, you never believe that you’re gonna

be old. Oh, absolutely.

I mean, it just doesn’t seem possible. And of course, there are funny counter examples right now in American life, but they’re very freighted. So we have an eighty year old president, but of course, people are howling for him to step down and not without reason. Right? So then again, you had somebody like Nancy Pelosi, whenever I see January sixth footage of her and she’s so calm and she’s such a badass and I’m looking at her and going, my god, she’s eighty two in this clip.

And she is, like, so calm and so forceful in getting what she wants. Mhmm. So we had a house leadership that was, you know, quite old. But there were, you know, people were banging their spoons on their high chairs saying, when are you gonna step aside and let the new generation take over? And when people say that the Senate is a gerund occupancy.

It is never in a nice way. No. I mean — Never. No. — never.

But but the fact is, it is. So, I mean, we are electing older people. I mean, so it’s kind of double edged because it does exist in the United States. There are people with power who are older.

We

have complicated feeling. We don’t have unambivalent feelings about. Let’s put it that way.

Howard Bauchner: It feels like a cliche to say, you know, that the sixty is the new forty, but the reality is that things have shifted. I look at old pictures and you see all of these old people and realize they’re like forty three.

Well well, first of all, they smoked. But I I get but you’re absolutely right. We we age a lot better now. We look a lot younger. I mean, I have all sorts of unwinds available to put on my face that made me look a lot younger.

I don’t smoke and I never did in spite of my Brenda Fekara voice, never did. That reference alone will age me. In fact, I’m even too old for Brenda Faccaro. So I am. I just you know, Kathleen Turner, that’s a better one or do me more.

But I think you’re absolutely right. I look at pictures of and that’s another reason. I think that when I think of a fifty three year old, I think of my parents as cohort fifty three, and they looked different. And they were closer to retirement, frankly. I mean, I had my kid later, and I’m a stepmother.

So, you know, I just sort of feel like I’ve gotta keep pottery along for a while.

So you close with an insight from Margaret Atwood who is eighty three, and she’s got a good attitude. She

does. So she didn’t really grok my question. Maybe she did grok it, but said she felt eighty three and she liked eighty three and she likes being old and in some ways it’s a greater pleasure being old than it is being fifty three. And, you know, when you’re fifty three, you’re very aware of how much older you are than, you know, other people. But when you’re eighty three, you really are old.

So what the heck? I think that what she was emblematic of was the work that has been done by a woman at Yale named Becca Levy. Who sort of says that if you’ve got a positive attitude toward aging, you are likely going to age better. And this is not to say that if you think that you are younger in your head, you’re not going to age better. There’s some evidence to suggest that you might also age well.

I think what they both have in common is you see yourself as useful. Mhmm. If you don’t think there’s anything wrong with getting old, like, hey, I have hard won wisdom. I’m self accepting. You know, I have self esteem now.

There are all sorts of things. Mhmm. Then I think that like put you in pretty good stead for the years ahead of you. That’s what I’d say.

I also think people don’t necessarily tell young people that it’s actually rather relaxing at a certain point when you don’t feel all of that stress because for most of your life, you are Jonathan Last under pressure of all the many, many different possibilities, all the different things you can do, what you’re missing out on, what mistakes you are making, And there comes in Asia, and I was thinking about that from market at Wood where you’re basically you’re a lot of bleeps to give. You are what you are. There is that lack of stress. Of like, what am I going to be? What am I going to do?

Am I going to succeed? Am I going to fail? What do people think of me? At a certain point, It is kind of the ultimate relaxing liberation, isn’t it? To basically say, this is what I am.

I love that. This is it.

I love that. Well, you know, that’s what you’re also getting at is the paradox of choice. Right? There’s been all kinds of work on this. A woman named I think is her name Sheena Ayengar?

Her last name is Ayengar. Whatever it is. She was at Columbia for years and she might still be, but she, you know, did the classic study where if you put three kinds of jam or six kinds of jam out, you know, for people to taste, they will be much more likely to pick one and buy one then if you put out forty eight kinds of jam, because suddenly it’s too much. Right? It’s overwhelming.

Yeah. It’s overwhelming. If you give people two different options for their 401s, more likely to pick one than if you give them fifteen. And I think there is something to be said for like, oh my god. You know, a lot of doors are closed now.

Yeah. My routine is what my routine is. Like you said, you’re just talking about, like, some things have been taken away from you so that you wake up. Also, I think the ambition monkey is not on your back. That’s not an additional bonus.

But what you’re saying is you’re sort of on a rail and you know where the train is going.

Yeah. That’s exactly right. Jennifer, thank you so much for coming back on Secret Podcast. Jennifer senior is a staffer at the Atlantic winner of the twenty twenty two Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing also, the author of the book All Joy and No Fun. The paradox of modern parenthood, and you can read her peace on subjective age in the April issue of the Atlantic.

It’s been great talking with you, Jennifer.

Been great talking with you. Can I just put in one plug for one thing? Please. My Pulitzer piece. My the piece that I won the Pulitzer for, what Bobby McLean left behind or twenty years gone, is coming out in book form.

It’s gonna be this elegant, slim little paper back — On on grief — On grief. — of lost memory actually

had that in my notes that I just mentioned this. Yes. It’s coming out in a book form on Greek, obvious in an amazing read.

Yeah. In April, Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You can order it online, so I’m very proud of that.

You wanna be But

anyway, I I just enjoyed you. Charlie Sykes said this has just been a This has

been a blast. Jennifer, thank you so much, and thank you all for listening to today’s Bulwark podcast. I’m Shirley Sykes. We’ll be back tomorrow, and we’ll do this all over again. Secret Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper, an engineered and edited by Jason Brown.

Former Navy SEAL Sean Ryan shares real stories from real people from all walks of life. On the Ryan Show. This one’s about my friend call sign ninja. So there was all these things that I wanted to do in the army. He’s like, this is and army do roads and airfields, and they say, well, they can test and see where you fall.

I say, yeah. But if I could do that and all this stuff too, Drive tanks jump out of planes. Do you guys have a sampler platter? The Sean Ryan show on YouTube or wherever you listen.