At what age must a person be before they are officially considered old? Some atheletes believe that its 35, most other people believe its between 40 and 50. Most teens think that its after 30. To you, ( viewers that I consider mostly to be the average person ), what do you consider the average age should be before one can be considered old?
“Old” is generally 9 to 11 years older than whatever age **I ** am!!
“Old enough,” however, is a different story! 
Strictly IMHO:
Young: under 35
Middle-aged: about 35–60
Oldish: 60–75
Old: over 75
Im only 18 and my 10 year old cousin thinks I’m old…but I think it depends on the person some 20 year olds act like 40 year olds and some 40 year olds act like 20 year olds.
I for one have pretty consistently considered my own age plus 10 years as the onset of decrepitude. That looks pretty objective to me.
I don’t think of someone as “old” until they’re in their 60s or 70s. This is probably because my parents had me late, but look younger than they are. (I remember when I found out that not all parents start having kids in their 30s. That was a shocker to me.) I have no idea how they did it (especially since they’ve both had tobacco habits), but to this day (my mom’s in her 50s and my dad’s probably in his 60s) nobody ever guesses they’re over 40.
One of my best friends (both of us are 17) thinks of anyone over 30 as old. The absurdity of that doesn’t quite hit until you hear her say: “Allison Hannigon (sp?) is pretty hot, but she’s old”. sigh
A couple of my friends occasionally say things like “I don’t plan to live past 35”. I’m not sure at all what that means, and I’m not sure I want to.
I should clarify that the last comment in my last post means “I’m not sure I know what they mean, and I’m not sure I want to know either”.
Well, there’s a good argument to be made that it’s anything over 30. After all, the biological blueprint for humans had us dying off at about age 30 or so for the first million years or so of our existance. It wasn’t until recently, relatively speaking, that we started screwing with the blueprint and have now doubled our lifespans at a minimum.
Echoing Eve:
Young Adult: Under 30
Regular Adult: 30-45
Middle-aged: 45-65
Old: 70
Elderly: 85+
Hmmm, I’m not sure what you are between 65 and 70. Maybe old middle-aged?
I generally agree with Eve’s categories above. I’m 37, and I describe myself as on the youngish side of middle-aged. My life seems to be running about five years behind other people my age, though, so I feel younger.
I feel old whenever one of my radio preset stations changes format.
I know nobody is changing formats in my direction any more.
Oh Yeah, Once you hit 40 forget it, time to start looking at Nursing Homes. If you think you are “old” when you hit 40 then you got a lot of living and learning to do. Just so you all know I am “officially” old.
My father once told me, “People look at me and see a 60-year-old man, which always strikes me as odd because in my mind I’m 22.”
I’m 53 now, and I know just what he was talking about.
I’d more or less echo Eve’s numbers, other than I have a hard time thinking that most of the cast from Friends is already middle-aged. Is Johnny Depp, Keanu Reeves, Julia Roberts, or Tom Cruise middle-aged? I have a hard time with that.
Even when I was 17, I always thought that “middle aged” started somewhere around 50-55 or so. But even that number is flexible, with some under-50 people being “middle-aged” because they look and dress like old farts. (You know what I mean—bad comb-overs, belts up at their nipples, women with old-lady tight-perms and sweatshirts with appliqued cats on them. I don’t care how “young” you think you are, if you dress like that, you are MIDDLE AGED.)
“Oldish” starts at around 60, but then again, is Harrison Ford old? Middle-aged, definitely, but old? I’m just not seeing it.
“Elderly” starts at about 70 or 75. (But then again, is Sean Connery elderly?)
There are just too many loopholes to this. Best not to think about it too deeply. 
Not true at all, except in the sense that many, many children died very young, and their mothers sometimes died in childbirth, thereby dragging down the average lifespan of a population. If you survived childhood/childbirth, I think you had a fairly good chance of living almost what we would call a “normal” lifespan. After all, “threescore and ten” is given in the Bible as a typical lifespan. Without being a fundamentalist, I think there must be at least a kernel of truth in that assessment.
40 isn’t old, 'cause that’s what I am. Like Al (Einstein) said, “It’s all relative.”
Vlad/Igor
“Elderly” was once a more complimentary way of saying “old”. I think it’s now the reverse. When I’m old…I’ll just be “old”. When Frodo asked Tom Bombadil who he was, Tom said “I’m the oldest, that’s the only answer.” He didn’t say he was the ‘most elderly’.
Squshilly IMO using the “Eve template”:
“Kid”: 18 to under 25
Young Adult: 25ish-32ish
Regular Adult: 32ish-45ish
Middle-aged: 45ish-60ish
late middle age: 60ish-early 70’s
Old: somewhere over 72ish
I also agree that it is all dependant on the person and full, hard “drop dead dates” (so to speak) lines are just plain silly
So there you have it.
IMO using the “Eve template”:
Kid 1-10 = Cute
Teen 11-16 = Less Cute + Attitude + Spots
Young Adult 17-30 = No longer Cute, Less spots, less attitude, ‘some signs of intelligence ;)’
Adult 30-45 = ‘fully formed intelligence’, may show signs of being ‘grown up’
Middle-aged 45-55 = ‘intelligence starts to get stale’, high signs of stress, mid-life crisis in attempt to avoid becoming ‘grown up’
Getting Old 55-65 = starting to slow down, less stress, fully ‘grown up’
Old 66-75 = successfully retired, realizes that being ‘grown up’ was a bad idea and scraps it
Elderly 76+ = starting to get doddery and forgetting things