I get the older we get, the less pronounced the progression of maturity becomes apparent.
I sometimes wonder, if a 60-something year old ever looks at a 40-something year old and think to themselves: “Awe, that’s sweet. I remember when I used to think/act like that. Such naive children.”
OK, that last bit was hyperbole, but you catch my meaning.
I ask, because at 43, I feel like I can notice a difference between a 30-something and a 40-something, maturity wise. Not a big distinction mind you, but a noticeable one.
I admit this could all be confirmation bias.
The usual complaint is that older people are more conservative, more cranky, more prejudiced, etc. That may not be what we normally think of as “more mature” but it suggests that our personalities continue to change.
Now get off my lawn and take your wacko “social science” ideas with you!
I am *not *more cranky than I was at age 40, 35 years ago, **however now **I have no inclination to suppress my crankiness. I am much less inhibited and just let it rip whenever I feel like it.
I do tend to find 20-30 somethings fairly tedious to listen to. I’m assuming that I was tedious at that age also. I’m also fairly certain at age 66 that the 80-90 somethings that I deliver food to consider me to be “that nice young man who comes on Friday”. Like janeslogin, I’m no more cranky than I used to be, but I can’t be fired, and I don’t have to impress anybody, so buyer beware.
One thing I can do in my 60’s that I couldn’t do in my 40’s or 50’s (and definitely not before that) was keep a secret. I can hear really juicy gossip and not tell anyone. I can keep quiet when before I’d blab like Joan Rivers on steroids. I can recognize that not everyone wants to hear what I have to say. I don’t have to be the first to share bad news. Some things don’t concern me, so I can butt out.
Imho, theres a single point where people stop thinking selfishly. Any single person hits this at almost a random age. Some never do. Its at that point people mature. If someone hits it at 50, and encounters someone at 40 who hasn’t, they get that feeling you described.
One thing is for damn sure: youth is totally wasted on the young. If I could go back and shake my 25-year-old’s shoulders and knock some sense into his head . . .
But now, at 68 (today), I realize that I am the product of all that came before. I wouldn’t be the same person I am today, if I’d been different at 25. I had to go through each growth period in order to get to the next one. For me, it seems that change has accelerated, each decade sees more changes than the previous. The only thing I’ve lost is certainty. My thinking is much less black-and-white than it used to be. But what has diminished is my energy level, and I really wish I could find a way around that.
And I wish I could still do math in my head and spell.
I don’t think I’ve change all that much in the past 20 years, except, perhaps to become more liberal. The main difference is that I have more experience in life.
MHO: People stop maturing at whatever age they start coasting. If you stop learning, stop thinking, stop challenging yourself (or being challenged by life), stop being exposed to new people or places or things, and just stay within your comfort zone, that’s when you stop maturing.
To me, the biggest shock of adulthood was that most people’s psychological/social development stops or slows to a crawl in their early 20s. Underneath the trappings of adulthood, most men and women behave exactly as I expect they did as children. They may have learned some things along the way, but most of them are just as kind, cruel, inquisitive, ignorant, petty, giving or what have you as their 20 year old selves were.
Once you hit “maturity” the only thing left to do is either mellow out or go senile, so you can think of being “mature” as a value of 1.0 on a scale of 0.0 to 1.0. There is no 1.1.
Maturity is this nebulus concept that varies from one person to the next. If I had to guess, mature people:
Heed their responsibilities, and avoid taking on more than they can.
Treat others well
Are reasonable and possess a measure of restraint
You may gain further insights as you age, but once you are mature those things are unlikely to substantially affect your basic habits. I suspect any differences you may perceive over the years are due to the nature of hindsight, and our natural inclination to be hard on ourselves.
You should continue to get more mature as you gain more experiences. Some people have experiences thrust upon them, some people seek out new experiences, but most people gain them somehow. I am basically the same person I was 30 years ago but I like to think I have better judgment. Raising children is a game-changer, for example.
I don’t think maturity is a negative–I wouldn’t want to be called immature. But being mature doesn’t mean you have to be a stodgy old fuck. Being mature means you are the one that people go to when they don’t know what to do.
At 42 I’m not an Old Doper, but something I’ve noticed is that when people hit their mid-50s they often seem to go through a kind of second adolescence: an “I know everything”/“been there, done that” phase. Not as bad as the attitude teenagers have – at least a 55-year-old can back it up – but noticeable. The ones who go through that phase seem to grow out of it by the time they hit 60.
(Maybe it’s just a phenomenon among the folks I know who are that age: it certainly doesn’t happen to everyone, but I’ve noticed it often enough to think it could be a “thing”).
To sum up all of the replies and respond to the OP -
The feeling that other people aren’t where you are, or where you think they should be, has nothing to do with age. (You’re age, their age, the ice age…)
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