29 is “grown up”, 40 is old.
I’m 39. 
0-1 Infant/Baby
1-10 Young/Boy/Girl
11-15 Teenager
16-25 Young Adult
26-40 Adult
41-60 Middle Aged
61-80 Old
81-83 Old Fart
84 - Dead
At least that’s my current course setting.
I’m 32. Old depends on what we’re talking about.
In general? 70ish seems old to me.
There are other levels of old as in “too old to wear THAT” or “her’s too old for me to date” or “I’m too old to go there”
Luckily, I think old can be a state of mind that you can avoid.
I’ll be 50 on Saturday. Which seems weird. But I agree that being old is really a matter of attitude and ability. (I really like FCM’s definition!)
I’m part of a large volunteer group and most volunteers are quite a bit older than I am. Some of the youngest people I know are approaching 80. I met up with one of my friends on Saturday for a little while. She’s 77 and had her her bike in tow because she was going to go explore a bike trail she hadn’t been on yet. I don’t think anyone meeting her would think she’s her age - they’d probably think she’s in her 60s. When I grow up, I want to be just like her. 
GT
I coach a women’s canoe team (22 person dragon boat and six person outrigger, both canoes about 40 feet long). The crew members come in all shapes, sizes and ages, and they all paddle very hard and very well.
I never thought of any of them being old until at the end of last season, one of the crew said that she was thinking of retiring from competitive racing next year. She was 80. I tend not to think much about a person’s age, but it struck me that she was old, for simply due to the general physical deterioration due to her age, she was no longer able to do something that she loved doing.
I need to edit while I can… I meant “He’s too old for me to date” not her’s. Oh well.
My ex-boss, a composite of every Anne Bancroft as a Jewish mother role, was the granddaughter of a woman whose family, Jewish academics who had converted to Christianity in the late 19th century, was driven out of Russia by the Bolsheviks. They settled in Germany (they were Auslanders ancestrally) where she and three of her sons were trapped by the Nazis who hated them for being Jewish (even though they weren’t by religion, but were by ancestry) and for being liberal academics and for being Russian. She fled the country by going east back through Russia, then into Siberia and China, and working her way to America as a cook and nurse on a trading ship, arriving in San Francisco the week Pearl Harbor was bombed. Once in America she joined two of her sons who had already emigrated; a third son made it to England where he spent the war, a fourth lived on forged papers in Germany, and a fifth was a resistance fighter who was killed in action in Poland. At the time this woman was in her late 50s, and the reason she went through Russia/China by herself was knowing she would probably slow down her sons and grandkids trying to get out.
Eventually she came to live with my boss, who described her as “an unholy old bitch” of a person- completely convinced she was the only intelligent person on earth- but also “fascinating and awe inspiring”. In her 90s she got into an argument with a Jewish neighbor and began learning Hebrew (some of her relatives had been rabbis, but her own family had converted to Eastern Orthodoxy when she was a little girl) in order to win a point about the Talmud. Also in her 90s she had an argument with my boss (and was annoyed by my boss’s young children living in the same house), bought a car, and drove across country to move in with another grandchild. My boss was impressed at this, though when she moved shortly after she didn’t let her cousin have the address for fear her grandmother would move back in with her.
This is an inspiration to me somehow- that a woman in her 90s could be that intellectually curious and independent and even that cantankerous and hard headed. She sounds a lot less old than some of the silly 50 year olds I’ve known who have already taken to wearing granny sweaters and sexless outfits and blathering on about every damned thing their grandkids do.
I’m 21. Old is 50’s - or more. Serious, I sometimes think of 80’s being old, not 50’s, but today I’m not so sure.
Brendon Small
Way back when, when I was a wee tot, my 70 year old Great Gramma told me that 75 was old. When I was a sweet young thing, she told me that old was 80. When I was a blushing bride, Great Gramma assured me that “old” wasn’t until at least 93. Always 5 years older was “old.”
Until, a few days before she died, she told me she was old.
Works for me. 93 is old.
BTW – she brought it up every time. She was a very cool Great Gramma.
I’m 38. I think 70-75, depending on your health is old. 50+ is like older, but not actually old. If you’re 60 and in bad health, though, I’d probably think of you as old.
I’m 42 and I’m old until my first cup of coffee. 
But sense I plan on liveing till I’m 500 or so I guess I’m still just a baby.
I’m counting on rideing the wave of science till I do everything I want to do, 500 years sounds about right. But by then I’m sure I’ll think differently.
I’m 45 and I’m old. I don’t feel old; its just that I see ‘old’ in all of the looks all the people around me give me. When women stop hitting on you, even if you know you’d never accept the offer, you think you’re old.
When they look at you with the contempt of something they just scraped of their shoe just for trying to be cheerful and saying ‘morning’ at the office coffee pot, you know you really are old.
I’m 62.
Old is 63.
Ask me again next year.
A friend of mine who was pregnant with twins a couple of years ago when she was 38 agreed to be on a TV news segment about (as they told her) “women who delay having children until after they have begun a career”. During an hour long interview she was asked what she regretted about not having kids younger and she said “Well… my parents were also in their 30s when I was born, so they’re in their early 70s now, which means my kids will never get to know their grandparents as well as I’d like”, but mainly they spoke of the cabbages and kings of pregnancy in a two career family.
She told her family she was going to be on TV and gave them the address for the webcast. When the report aired it was called “Problems of Aging Mothers” and of the hour she was interviewed on tape all that they aired was a five second blip of her saying “my kids will never get to know their grandparents”. Her father called her immediately after watching to ask “Have you picked out my grave yet? Cause I’d like for it to be a nice place for the babies to play.”
I suppose if I had to set an age limit, I’d go with the female fertility cycle. Young is “the fertile years”- up to 45 or so, with internal divisions just like middle class is divided into “Upper middle” “middle” “Lower middle”: childhood, adolescence, then “Young Adult” “Middle Young” “Older Young”. Invisible curtain in the late 40s early 50s it’s middle age, and old age begins in the early 70s with mandatory Social Security and what not.
This thread reminds me of the episode of Northern Exposure, however, when Hollin, who was 65 or so but from a family where men usually lived to be centenarians, and Chris, who was 30 in a family where men died in their early 40s, were going through their mid-life crises together.
I’m 51 now but look 10 years younger. But I feel old in that there’s increasingly ‘nothing new under the Sun’.
It’s hard to find new music that excites me for example.
I mean no disrespect to the musicians or their fans but Coldplay, Kaiser Chiefs etc etc etc etc are just reploughing old ground in a half-arsed fashion to my ears. But they aren’t singing for me or my age group. They deal with issues and problems that just aren’t anymore.
That makes me feel old.
I think that’s part of it. At certain ages, people have certain lifestyles. So when people get older and move on to the next stage in life, we associate them as being “old” or at least “older”. Like the example I gave before: when you’re 18-19 in college in that study/party/eat pizza every night with your five roomates mode, a 24 year old graduate with a job seems so “adult”. Of course, once I graduated and found out that a lot of people that age essentially behaved the same way they did in college, they just had money now, it didn’t seem that old anymore.
When the cops start looking young, you’re old.
I’ve just come back from the first funeral of one of my circle of friends. Not somebody’s old mum or summat… one of us - and natural causes too.
I don’t know what to think.
I’m 56. I’ll be old when we elect a president younger than me. That could happen next year! :eek:
Well I’m officially old, then. Cops, doctors, teachers, pick an “authority figure” and I’ve spent the last few years looking at the ones I’m confronted with and thinking “Seriously?” :dubious: