The Bulwark Podcast - Jennifer Senior: How Old Are You in Your Head?

Episode Date: March 1, 2023

People over 40 tend to see themselves as about 20% younger than their actual age. Is it because aging is seen as bad — or because they're optimistic that they have many years ahead? Plus, living with long Covid, and John Fetterman's depression. Jennifer Senior joins Charlie Sykes today. Show notes Jennifer's recent Atlantic articles: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/04/subjective-age-how-old-you-feel-difference/673086/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/02/john-fetterman-checks-into-hospital-clinical-depression-stroke/673112/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/02/long-covid-symptoms-chronic-illness-disability/673057/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 staff writer at The Atlantic, winner of the 2022 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. You're my favorite. Can I say this? God, am I allowed to have favorites? Anyway, I love being interviewed by you, Charlie Sykes. Well, thank you.

I do. And I love your podcast. Well, you're definitely allowed to say that because there's a mixed opinion about all of this. So the last time 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 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 think he was so used to being able to seduce journalists. And I think I was unseducible. That's odd. Yeah. Because journalists never write anything negative about him because they don't mock him. They don't see him as an American Rasputin. 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, not 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 long piece about him once he was in exile, once he was just on his own. Michael Wolff 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 know, his sort of asymmetrical influence on a subset of the electorate, the kinds of people who might have, for example, shown up at the Capitol,

you know, in fur and, you know, with axes and nooses. And horns. And horns, right. Yeah. A very dangerous form of cosplay. The normal way that patriots would dress. Like Vikings. Yes, of course. You know, Viking wear. 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 Trump. So you're awfully kind about Michael Wolff's book, which I continue to think was one of the more cringeworthy things

to come out of the resistance. We're going to have to agree to disagree. Oh, really? Okay. 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 those trivial things. Those minor things. So I think I told you. What I was going to say is- Okay. So go ahead. No, no, no. Go on. Sorry. Again, it's me, the mouthy Brooklyn girl cutting off the polite Midwesterner. I do this every time. You go. It's funny because you're the only person that thinks girl cutting off the polite Midwesterner. I do this every time.

You go. It's funny because you're the only person that thinks of me as a polite Midwesterner, I think. Really? I don't think Midwesterners really is. I think that we have dined out for a long time on this idea that Midwesterners are nice or 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 told you before that my wife and I 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 want to get to that in a moment. But I also want to talk to you about a couple of other things you have written, all of which are incredibly interesting. John Fetterman'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. 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 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 pains. I don't know. What are they about? You know, don't know. Well, 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 in Groundhog Day, that toaster oven nestled under his arm. Yes. I have many exits past giving a shit. You go on to tell a seriously unfiltered anecdote, but you get the idea. 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 mentioned that before you got it, it was not really on something you thought about that you thought could happen to you. No, because you probably within your immediate circle don't know anyone who has long COVID. I don't have anyone in mind. No. 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.

I was up in Vermont at the time. I was canoeing. I was hiking. I was cooking. I was in fine shape. I barely got sick. And what my GP, ex-GP, should have realized, knowing me, is that I'm immune compromised. He should have realized my body wasn't putting up a fight. And it was just having its way with me. It was just, it lingered. You probably didn't test positive for as long as I did. And my very bad symptoms started to appear on day 10, which is way outside the PaxLivid window. And I was steered away from

PaxLivid 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 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 mild case, given that I have 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 popped positive. Yeah. I remember meeting you at a conference and it was like the next week that- 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 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 no way. No. So this is the kind of question I would not normally ask anyone, except that you've written

about it. 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 Omicron 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 manage 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 understand that 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 cavern 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 still 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, you know, life had really resumed. And also I feel this whenever I go on a subway and everybody's not wearing a mask. I'm not angry at them for not wearing a mask and not protecting me. 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 stank. Know that it totally sucked, 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, you know, it's gotten better now. There are medications I can take, you take. And people don't take it seriously either, which also makes me angry. It makes me kind of furious. I mean, the unfiltered anecdote that I told was running into somebody who was very high up on the masthead of the New York Times. He asked me how I was and I said, I had long 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 esprit d'escalier where I had like 7 million things I wanted to say. And I think I haltingly said, you know, I produced 35,000 words of copy this year. I had two cover stories. And I was the first person to do that since James Fallows in like 1998. You know, and I had then a third story on Steve Bannon, all within one calendar year, plus a couple of short pieces. It was like, then he started backpedaling, you know, but he said, was this too soon? And I said, no, it was just too mean. I 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. Yes. That's right. On month five, it would have been inclining to set, 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 to an event, I must've been fine without recognizing that, you know, I am held together with like duct tape and bubble gum 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 Klonopin so that I am not dizzy because it dampens your vestibular system. I'm taking meloxicam so that, you know, I am, 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 summon the will to get out of bed. A couple of months later, it was determined that like 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 80 year old, you know, and all these things like make you feel estranged from yourself, you know? I mean, it's terrible. You mentioned, you know, the depression, you know, some of the biological, some of it, that sense that everybody else was going on with their lives. And obviously, I mean, very clearly this gave you the perspective to write one of your more recent stories about John Fetterman. I mean, I think it's interesting, your personal experience, how it dovetails with your journalism. You wrote a very interesting piece, John Fetterman and the performance of wellness, the particular challenge of enduring depression as a public

figure. 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 U.S. senators or politicians as actual people, but the whole idea of that you're always on, you are 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 John Fetterman and what he is going through and how we ought to think about this. That was a really good segue into this, actually, because, right, we were talking about my depression, and it did give me a window onto this. So when I was, you know, a cub reporter, I was like 24. 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 U.S. Capitol and noticed immediately not just how porous it was, but how accessible senators and members of the House were. And that they always had to have their game face 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 to 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 puffy hats and chef's hats and flip pancakes

and, you know, and sit and read to school children. They can never, the great thing about watching Veep was that, you know, Selena 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, constantly dissolving. And when you are depressed, you just want to 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 Fetterman has had to do, setting aside the fact that like, who wouldn't be

depressed if they'd had a stroke at 52 or 53 or however old he was when he had it. I mean, it's depressing to be unwell. And it's isolating to be unwell, particularly if you can't communicate. But he has, in addition to all of 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, when his son died, that stuffed inside, tucked inside this very public guy who was doing vice presidential things, was a man who was deeply suffering and couldn't show it. And he would with Colbert, which was fascinating. Yeah. I can only relate in part to this not being a politician and basically living my life now 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 dinner with people who had been on a trip or something together. And it was really a bad choice by me, but to go out and I had to perform exactly the way you were describing it. And 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 face, that forward, you know, trying 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 Fetterman and others have done this, you know, week after week, month after month after month. And frankly, that never occurred to me, that strain, 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 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 80 or if your mother is, you know, 40. 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 might not have been ready. So now I want to know what that was that was driving you. It was a sense of obligation. This is back in the day when I was on radio and the hosts would host a tour. And I think it was, I can't even remember now. I think it was a tour of Italy. And so we had spent 10 days together as a group and the, you know, we had 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 10 days. Time to get back. Make sure that you fulfill your responsibilities. And that was very strong back then. But I still regard that as a huge lapse in judgment. And again, as I said, it's only one day, one moment, and yet it's so indelible. I mean, I can remember it so intensely sitting there going, what the hell am I doing here? This is just terrible. This is a terrible experience. Well, okay. So two things are jumping out at me. Number one, your sense of self-recrimination, right? Which you were saying, isn't it weird that you feel shame and you're angry at yourself for getting COVID when it's not your fault? It wasn't your fault for saying yes to that,

but it is funny how we do that. Second, so now imagine John Fetterman's schedule, which is just packed cheek by jowl with unignorable things, because he was elected by the taxpayers. He was elected by Pennsylvanians to do a certain number, right? So whatever you had, like multiply that by a coefficient of like 1 million, and that's a Senate schedule. Yeah. Exactly. The other, if we can riff on this for a second, you know, this is something I've always wanted to run by you in particular and your 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 backstage personalities. So you can always tell when somebody is a faker, when they are very different off camera or off stage. 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 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 four in the morning and they're playing hearts, that would be Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan, who came of age in front of cameras and 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, very well. And the backstage personalities who would be backstage even when they were out at public events, like John McCain, who would be angry and be kind of sarcastic and be kind of sarcastic and

be kind of ironic. He could make it as a senator. And we liked those guys as senators. Howard Dean, wry, sarcastic, angry again. But they couldn't be presidential candidates. Ultimately, we wanted people who could put on the mask and be more formal. And John Fetterman 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 Deans and with the McCains, but ultimately we chose guys who were much more comfortable as French stage personalities.

Until Donald Trump. I was going to just say, until Donald Trump. So what happened? My theory worked so well until Donald Trump, where we just had this potty mouth and this id and this angry charlatan. And I think that's a part of the larger transformation. And this was something that I think Paul Ryan, in my interview with him, sort of touched on that after 2012, when he and Mitt Romney were defeated and were surprised and the base was surprised, that the voters just decided they wanted a different kind of candidate. They wanted somebody who was going to be truculent. They wanted somebody who was going to be, you know, punch the right people in the face. But you're right. You know, Donald Trump inverts that

whole thing. Remember, we used to say, well, you know, you want to have a beer with Bill Clinton. I mean, I don't want to have a beer with Donald Trump. Or DeSantis. Right. As you were saying, you know, the people with, you know, 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 a little bit pathological. There is no internal life. There is no shame. They're a little bit pathological. They have no real conscience. They can become anything they want to become. I don't know which category it is, but then in 2016, 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. 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 know, a Ted Cruz or a Josh Hawley or anything, these guys are complete phonies, right? They're obviously phonies. So when they're backstage, what are they? If you drill deep enough down into Ted Cruz's soul, what would you find? But I think you'd find something actually. Yeah, but why? 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 corner? Who is that? Okay. So who is the little troll who lives inside? I mean, I think he's an angry 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. He was hellbent on being right. 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, right. I actually have a picture here in my office, which I have turned upside down of me and Ted Cruz right before the Wisconsin primary in 2016, 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 in that idea. I don't think you were tripping on anything.

So, okay, I want to 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 can remember talking to my

mother when she was in her 80s and she said, you know, I don't feel 80. I feel like I'm in my 40s or my 50s. 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 40, you are on average going to shave about 20% off of your age in your head. So I don't know how old you are. How old are you in your head, Charlie, I should ask? Somewhere in my 40s. I think that I'm comfortable thinking of myself as 48 when in fact I'm 68, which by the way, I find shocking

to say that number. I have to admit to you, I find it shocking to say that I am 68. It seems so completely wrong. Well, it feels like an error. It feels like a system malfunction or something. How did this happen? Right. How did this happen? And you were talking about like, you're kind of sneering at your mother. The mistake that the young make, I think, is thinking that older people are ready to age, are ready to die. And was it Philip Larkin who referred to our existence as the million-petaled flower of being here? I mean, we like being here. And when you're 80, there's still so many petals left to go. I mean, I 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 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 it was doing the dishes. And he said, no, how much time do you need here on earth to do all the things you want to get done? And he said, cause I figure I need about 250 years. And this is, I think the mistake people make. And another thing that you said about your mother reminded 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. 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 age we are. Now, the studies that I've looked at are very crude. They all tend to say, oh, you know, it's ageism. You know, people have internalized our culture's fetish, you know, with youth. 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 40s because when you were in your 40s, you were in your professional sweet spot and you felt like you had several pivots left in your life. And, you know, I feel 36 was when I would, I knew what the contours were of my life. I hadn't yet filled it in. I was still rooming with potential. I was paired off with my husband. I was about to get pregnant. I knew we were going to start a family, but all that stuff was ahead. So it's kind of that moment when potential and competence are in equipoise, 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. 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? 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 you asked the question on Twitter, right? You asked the question, how old are you in your head? And what did people say? Yeah, well, I had long COVID, I did this out of boredom. 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 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 further back. And by the way, if you're below the age of 25, statistically, you probably are more likely to think that you're older, not younger. That's another thing I should point out. But what did people say to me on Twitter? On Twitter, they said things to me like, I am 32 because that's the age my sister was when she died and I can't be older than my sister. That was poignant. A lot of them said the same things to

me that I had said that, you 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 that I just loved, and I put it in the piece. He said it in a private message to me. His name is Ian Leslie, and he's written a number of social science books and great stuff about the Beatles and Paul McCartney. He said, the problem with being a 50-something and thinking you are a 30-something is that when you are in a room full of 30-somethings and you are talking to them, you don't think that you are any older than them. And it's true, but they know that you are old. And I have had this experience so many times where I will be talking to a 30-something and I will be thinking that we are peers. And I have had this experience so many times where I will be talking to a 30-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 Judi Dench. I may as well be Maggie Smith in a room with a view. And by the way, I looked at Maggie Smith when I watched A Room with a View recently. She was younger than me when she played like the old dowager aunt. Maggie Smith has been playing dowagers for like 38 years. I mean, it is astonishing. And so maybe, you know, women, there's some added thing where, you know, if we had our kids later and, you know, I still have a teenager at home, right? I don't know. I can't think of myself as being the 53-year-old that my mom was, where I was already 31. That doesn't scan for me. I have my own theory on this, which I'll share with you in just a little while. I also thought

it was interesting that we write about the old souls who actually identify with older people, that when you were at the age of 10, you felt 40 because you couldn't stand the gossip and the cliquishness 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, that was the youngest reporter at the Milwaukee Journal. I was always the youngest at everything. And so there's still part of me that thinks that I am not the oldest person in the room I can't get my head around that phenomenon 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 wonder kin

if you were the wonder kin you're gonna always think of yourself as the youngest person in the room you were the extraordinary high achiever when When you were younger, you were precocious and saw yourself as older. And not only that, you were a wonderkind, I'm guessing, in your adolescence. 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 neurodevelopmental 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 adolescent self, which goes right up to the age

of 25, frankly, that's when the brain is still developing. Yeah, then it stands to reason, Charlie says, 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 19, 20-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. I mean, because they are. Because I'm living with

a 15-year-old who thinks he can do all these things that he simply cannot. I adore my son. He's wonderful. The 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 have to have this kind of outsized sense of risk or at least take great pleasure in risk in order to leave the family nest and go out on your own. So I don't know, a bunch of unripe bananas. Unripe bananas. Okay. So here's my thought. And believe it or not, I was not actually high when I came up with this. Okay. My wife and I were having the discussion of like, why we don't feel our age, why it comes as a shock to find out that I am 68. And let me just test this theory on you. The reason why I don't think that I'm 68

and you don't think you're 53 is because we have spent our entire life being younger. Right. We have spent decades not being 68. We spent a whole decade being in our 30s. We spent a whole decade being in our 40s. 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. No, it's not. It's perfect. Being the age you are now is a strange country that nothing has prepared you for. Your entire 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, from 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 going to have a lot of 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 blundering 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 your life, the older you get. So yeah, those

years felt longer and more substantial. I mean, do you remember how long a year felt when you were 22? I mean, it felt eternal. Think about when you were in high school, how long those four years were compared to four years, any four years recently? Well, lately it's four. Actually, that's not true now because I think our politics is in dog years now. Can you believe that we're like in year 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 90s weren't like ago. I mean, as far as I'm concerned, Bill Clinton is still president.

And I'm surprised that the 90s weren't like yesterday. I mean, this is still a thing for me. I mean, my musical tastes. I mean, I said this in my piece. You know, I'm slightly ashamed to admit this, but there's far more Duran Duran on my iPhone than there ought to be. I mean, a crap 1980s band. This has occurred to me that I am listening to music, mainly from the 1960s,

and that I am as far separated in time from when that music was made as pre-World War I was before that music. I mean, the gap in time. And that's hard to get your head around when you realize, okay, I'm listening to a piece of music that is 60 years old and was made in the mid-60s. You go back 60 years before that, and you're like 1906. Were people in 1965 listening to music from 1906?

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 things like, you know, the, the first Gulf war to kids now is like as far removed as like World War II was to me when I was in elementary school. I mean, 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 love the section in your book where you're talking about the global perspective, that Asia has a smaller gap between chronological age and internal age. Africa has the smallest. Because unlike our culture, elders are accorded more respect. There's actually, in Japan, there are newsstands with Japanese cartoon books featuring older people falling in love. There's a holiday called Respect for the Aged Day. People in their 70s and 80s lift weights in parks. I

suppose there's a little bit of that here. I don't know whether it's still true, but 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 20-year-olds, but you're in on the joke that, wait, your turn's coming. Oh, for sure. There is that. Right. But when you're 20, you never believe that you're going to be old. Oh, for sure. There is that. Right. But when you're 20, you never believe that you're going to be old. Oh, absolutely. I mean, it just doesn't seem possible. And of course, there are funny counterexamples right now in American life, but they're very freighted.

So we have an 80-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 6th 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 82 in this clip. And she is like so calm and so forceful and getting what she wants. So we had a House leadership that was quite old. But people were banging their spoons on their high chairs saying, when are you going to step aside and let the new generation take over? And when people say that the Senate is a gerontocracy, it is never in a nice way. I mean, never, 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 feelings. We don't have unambivalent feelings about it. Let's put it that way. It feels like a cliche to say, you know, that 60 is the new 40. But the reality is that things have shifted. I look at old pictures and you see all of these old people and you realize they're like 43. Well, first of all, they smoked. But you're absolutely right. We age a lot better now. We look a lot younger. I mean, I have all sorts of unguents available to put on my face that make me look a lot younger. I don't smoke and I never did in spite of my Brenda Vaccaro voice, never did, that reference alone will age me. In fact, I'm even too old for Brenda Vaccaro. I am. Kathleen Turner, that's a better one, or Demi Moore. 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 53-year-old, I think of my parents' cohort at 53, 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 got to keep pottering along for a while. So you close with an insight from Margaret Atwood, who is 83, and she's got a good attitude. She does. So she didn't really grok my question. Maybe she did grok it, but she said she felt 83 and she liked 83 and she likes being old.

And in some ways, it's a greater pleasure being old than it is being 53. And when you're 53, you're very aware of how much older you are than other people. But when you're 83, 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.

If you don't think there's anything wrong with getting old, like, hey, I have hard-won wisdom. I'm self-accepting. I have self-esteem now. There, all sorts of things, then I think that like puts you in pretty good stead for the years ahead of you. That's what I'd say. I also think that 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 constantly 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 an I was thinking about that from Margaret Atwood, where you're basically, you're all out 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 Iyengar? Her last name is Iyengar, whatever it is. She was at Columbia for years and she might still be,

but she did the classic study where if you put three kinds of jam or six kinds of jam out for people to taste, they will be much more likely to pick one and buy one than if you put out 48 kinds of jam because suddenly it's too much. It's overwhelming. Yeah, it's overwhelming. If you give people two different options for their 401ks, they're more likely to pick one than if you give them 15. And I think there is something to be said for like, oh my God, a lot of doors are closed now. My routine is what my routine is. Like you said, you're just talking about 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 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 the podcast. Jennifer, senior as a staffer at The Atlantic, winner of the 2022 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 piece on subjective age in the April issue of The Atlantic. It's been great talking with you, Jennifer. It's been great talking with you. Can I just put in one plug for one thing?

Please. My Pulitzer piece, the piece that I won the Pulitzer for, What Bobby McElveen Left Behind or 20 Years Gone, is coming out in book form. It's going to be this elegant, slim little paperback called on grief, on grief, love, loss, memory. I actually had that in my notes. I didn't mention this. Yes. It's coming out in a book form on grief, obvious in an amazing read. Yeah. In April. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You can order it online. So I'm very proud of that. You ought to be. But anyway, I just adore you Charlie sex. This has just been a blast. Jennifer, thank you so much. And thank you all for listening to today's

Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We'll be back tomorrow. And we'll do this all over again. The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.