Do you feel younger than your peers

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I definatly do, everyone is getting jobs and drinking alcohol and some are even having children and i feel exactly like i did when i was 15. i feel like im being left behind

It's funny. In some ways, I feel younger. I'd rather play video games, watch TV shows, and engage in immature Internet humor than do typical 21 year old activities (get drunk, hook up, and enjoy the resulting confusion and hangover; rinse and repeat). On the other hand, I feel older in a lot of ways. I'm interested in developing my professional skills, I seek long-term friendships and relationships, and I always think "how is this going to affect me in the future?", which is a typical trait of those older than 21. Such is the nature of not giving a moment's thought to age-based peer influence, I suppose.

In many ways I still feel like a little kid (like maybe 5-10) despite being almost 30.

Yes, definitely. I think there was a thread like this one before. There were quite a few replies there.

I think my social awkwardness makes me very helpless and incapable of interacting with people around my age on equal terms. I'm an adult male, but I lack the authority that many of them around my age have. I cannot exchange jokes and banter with them. That seems to be the way they develop and maintain their peer relationships. I'm completely left out of all that. This helplessness is making me feel younger (less experienced) than my peers.

The emotional age of aspies is "usually" about 2/3 of their actual age.

franknfurter, if you are 22,5 years old, it's "natural" if you feel like a 15 year old.

Last edited by qawer on 15 Mar 2013, 6:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Yes, a lot of the time I feel much younger than 29. Then there are times I feel a lot older. It's a kind of back-and-forth thing with my mental age.

I definitely feel younger. My best friend is a few months younger than me and I have noticed having her as my roommate this semester how much more mature she is emotionally. She says I am very childlike. Most of my friends have always been younger than me. But in some ways I do feel more mature than a lot of the people around me. I feel like I have been through more and had to work harder at things than many people, and that has given me more maturity in some ways.

on one hand I do. i even feel like my younger sibling has grown older than me. On the other hand, for a while I felt older than my peers. I was married, had kids, was serious and my peers were single and partying and having fun and doing all this stuff (that I wouldn't have been doing single, married, whatever) so i feel like i was ancient for a while then they all grew old around me. So, at 40 I still feel like I did when I was 25 and thought I felt older than everyone else. Now all the 40 year olds seem like they're 60! Does that make sense?

yes I feel younger than people my age. I'll be 50 this year. I still like doing things that I did when I was younger like reading, listening to music, playing games and doing puzzles.

Let's see...I'm 52, so that would put me in the emotional age range of mid-late 30s. For the most part, that sounds about right. There are times that I truly feel like a child in my head -- when I'm bouncing up and down with joy or rocking back and forth in agitation; when I'm watching cartoons from my childhood (Bugs Bunny, Tom and Jerry, Jonny Quest), when I have the desire to color with crayons or skip through the yard or cuddle with a stuffed animal.

I shock people all the time -- OBVIOUSLY shock them -- when they find out how old I am. Most people guess me to be about 37.

I wonder if my emotional age is the reason I have nothing in common with people my age (52). I feel MUCH younger than my brother, who is actually 19 months younger than me. I am MUCH more comfortable with people in their 30s or younger. I even seem to hit it off with high school and college kids.

Funny thing was when I was younger, i felt like I was being left behind for similar reasons among my group of friends. Now I feel like I am leaving them behind because most of them hadn't even finished school or even taken on responsibilities on their own. It kind of felt like that since I was the first to obtain a full G driver's license (Ontario driving, G1, G2 and G licensing system with G being full license and G1 being restricted), after being the last to obtain G1 status.

I always felt very younger than my peers. I still do, but I don't feel drawn to hang around younger people and I have problems with people my own age too. The trouble seems to be I don't have the life experiences of people in their forties and fifties -- marriage, children, grandchildren, high-level job -- that we can share. But people younger than that seem to come from a different culture; society is different from when I was their age. They seem in some ways way older than my peers when we were their age and at the same time way more immature in some ways. It's hard to explain.

When I was a child I always felt older than my peers. I remember I wanted to grow up fast so I could socialise with adults (I definitely preferred adults over peers). Nowadays I often feel younger (not all the time though). I think that's because I have problems with things people my age don't have problems with and because I behave a bit childish in certain situations (when getting really excited about an interest for example).

I have been told that I am very childlike. I collect toys and my favorite movies and TV shows are always those geared towards children (I will watch movies aimed at adults but they don't top my favorites lists like the kiddie movies do )

But more than my interests, I have also been told that the way I behave and handle situations is childlike.

I was always a bit more childlike, than others. When I was 25, people told me, I looked like a schoolgirl. I felt like a teen too.
Now I am turning 60 in late august, and I feel like being somewhere in my thirties, - but more experienced, of course.

Only in terms of life/career/social achievements. Otherwise I often wonder why my peers seem so immature in their thinking and decisions sometimes. I'm 30 but feel like I think like I'm much older, but have the social achievements of someone much younger. I suppose they balance each other out in the end.. but I really should work on bringing them much closer together.