I noticed this quarter that there’s something odd about the way that, in our society, we treat age. It started when somebody found out that I’m nineteen. He was surprised, and when I asked him how old he thought I was, he said probably around twenty-one or twenty-two. I instantly felt flattered, in the same way that I’ve felt throughout my teen years whenever somebody told me that I looked older than I was.

And then I started wondering: why is it a compliment to be told that you look older than you actually are when you’re young? And at what age does it become a compliment to be told that you look younger than your age? With celebrities who are in their forties and older, it seems like the biggest compliments they can get from the media is that they don’t look their age, as if it’s a bad thing. Is there ever a time when people want to be told that they look as old as they actually are?

I’d like to explore these questions further at some point, because I feel like age, and our preoccupation with it, and about how we look in relation to our age, is something that we talk about a lot, but I don’t really know how or when it started, or why.