Anyone else feel older than their age?

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For some reason I am not happy with my age. I am only 24 but I don't feel 24, I feel much older. I confess, I have been feeling this way for the past two years maybe. I am getting older so I already feel old. I don't even feel 24, I feel middle aged or feel like I am in my 30's. I don't know why. But when I see photos of me from last year or this year, I am reminded I am young. Same as when I get told "You're young" and at work a guy told me "You don't look twenty four" and I asked him how old do I look and he said "twenty."

Then other times I feel younger like a kid or teen, but lot of the times I feel old. But ironically I think 23 is young and 26 and 32 but yet I am 24 and I feel old. I have no idea why I am feeling this way. I don't like the idea of getting ugly when I get older. You lose your beautiness and you get wrinkles and your hair color changes :shudders: and your metablism so you are more prone to getting fat. My great grandmother hated being old too and her sister hated it too. Her words were "Being old is a living hell."

Perhaps I inherited these feelings?

Anyone else ever feel this way?

As a child I was afraid of growing up when I was 10-12 and then as an adult, I am having fear of getting old. I hate feeling this way.

I feel both older and younger. I feel younger in respect to what I can accomplish in and understand of the NT world, but I also think I was born a little old lady because of my lifelong tendency towards sadness and fatigue. I think my son is the same as me. I watch videos of very young family members and see their antics and general happy silliness and then remember how my son was very quiet and detached at the same age.

When I was young, I always felt like I was 35 when born. Seemed like other people were taking forever to grow up. At 57, 35 is okay.

I feel like in many ways I was born in my eighties, but at the same time I'm stuck in grade school. I'm guessing that this phenomenon can be generalized to the idea that none of us seem to be in sync with our peer groups at any age. I could easily say that the best friend I have made in years is nearly 50 years older than I am.

When I was ten I felt more like fifteen, when I was sixteen I felt more like twenty-something, and now I'm nineteen I feel like I'm in my thirties. Life is taking ages, I don't get why people always say it goes by fast.

I might laugh about me saying this at nineteen when I'm fourty, heh. But right now I have the feeling that I'll be tired of life once I get there.

Yeah-I've always felt inside like I'm about 45-55 years old since I was a child. Now that I'm in my 40's, it's great and I finally feel like people take me seriously.

I wouldn't worry about getting old physically. You're only in your 20's and have many, many great years ahead of you.

I've hardly ever felt my real age. When I was 16 I felt more like I was in my 60s in terms of attitudes, and got very conservationist and anti-"progress" in many ways. In my 20s a counsellor said that I was still trying to solve the problems of a teenager with the mind of a 26-year-old. Now I'm in my 50s I don't really feel that old unless I happen to be ill or if I look in the mirror on a bad day. Somehow I'm just kind of detached from my chronological age, for a lot of the time.

Hmmm.....I seem to remember some of the AQ questions were about my values being rooted in the past or the future instead of now?

In my 40s I did notice something that was probably the mid-life crisis - it's very hard to really appreciate that our lives are really finite until you've gone past the half-way point. I kept getting pangs of anxiety as I approached the 50 landmark. Before that, old age seemed like a thing that happened to other people. I was expecting the anxiety to just get worse as I got older and closer to the end, but after a year or two I just seemed to get used to it, so ti doesn't really bother me any more. The best description I've heard for the mid-life crisis is that it's the process of coming to a new relationship with death. Now I'm almost wishing myself to retirement age so I can get my hands on a nice pension and live my own life in my own way.

I hear ya Spokane, I'm all to familiar with this ahead of your time age feeling, especially for people like us.
Makes me sick, I wanna feel 14 again even though I'm 23, I don't want to go on 24 and feel 48, I already feel f*****g 40.

I've always felt older in terms of emotional intelligence and general maturity, but, frustratingly, much younger for my lack of independence. Before I always felt far more comfortable interacting with adults than people my own age, but now that I'm old enough to be considered an adult myself I still see myself as a teenager in terms of how dependent I am on others.

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<=== This is how old I feel.

I feel younger both younger and older. My parents used to say: "you are born old". I always feeled like a 30's also when I was 6-y-old!

Same here. My entire family always referred to me as a "little adult". During family get together's, I was always much more comfortable listening to the conversations of adults than I was trying to interact with the other kids my age.

Friends, acquaintances and former girlfriends have all told me I have the eyes of an old soul. I have always felt older than my chronological age, which makes me wonder how I'll feel if I make it to age 80 or 90.

For me it's almost like reverse aging, on a maturity level it seems like. When I was a baby I was at my wisest, as a child a little professor type wth a photographic memory, a bit older as a child very adult like, as a young adult I was probably at a peak in my owerall capability, though still rather hindered with my social and communication skills, but now every year that goes by I feel a little bit younger all the time. It's almost scary. I don't imagine I will get any more immature than I am now, as far as my interests go, and I just hope I'm not proven wrong on that because the prospect would be scary.