I’m still in my 20s, but as of a few years ago I started forgetting what’s my exact age. I always have to stop and recalculate it each time someone asks me. I get asked fairly infrequently, but when I do it’s a bit weird/embarrassing that I have to say “wait, let me calculate”. (I know when I was born, of course.)
It seems as if there’s no good reason I’d remember it, since it changes all the time and it is rarely mentioned in practice. But others, including people much older than myself, know their own age immediately.
I’m also terrible at remembering people’s names, I don’t know if that could be related?
My birthday never changes, but my age changes every year. I forget it for like 9 months of the year.
I have an august birthday and I keep forgetting sometimes until like January or something of next year then I just go have another and the cycle repeats
Yes,I have had to do math. It doesn’t really matter.
I did and I don’t even know how long I was wrong or when I lost track. I thought I was 27. I signed up for some forum and put in my birthday on my profile and it automatically put my age on my bio. I was like ‘lol stupid website that’s wrong’ then I did the math and realized that I was the stupid website that was wrong.
You’re not alone, I started not really remembering around that time too… Birthdays just weren’t a big deal anymore and there was so little call to bring it up once I was old enough to legally buy alcohol.
Eventually, you get to the point where you’d like to forget, and you may ask yourself, how did I get here?
After about 26 it doesn’t matter much any more.
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I started losing track in my late 20s, sometimes I would think I was +/-1 my real age. I just checked my age now and I’m one year younger than I thought I was. Woohoo!
For me it was after 30 (the pandemic didn’t help). It also doesn’t help being stuck in a perpetual rut of vaguely late 20s lifestyle due to how fucked the housing market is and how stagnant wages are.
I was 33 for almost 2 years. Covid did a number on my interpretation of time…
I had a birthday and thought I was 28 for about 6 months, until my younger brother had a birthday and said that he was 27. I know that I am 2 years older than him, so I said that he had made a mistake.
It turns out that I had my own age wrong for those 6 months.
This is normal. As a kid, you’re asked about your age much more often, and you’re often thinking about it as you look forward to hitting milestones - reaching a certain grade, your next birthday, legal age for driving, voting, drinking, and so on. Once you’re in your mid to late 20s it starts to matter a lot less, and people tend to have to do math, or if you’re like me, just ask your spouse.
I do this all the time. I’m 28 and about to be 29 next month, but I have to think about it to be absolutely certain. When I was less than 21, though, I could tell you my exact age, whenever you asked, no problem.
When you’re 53, yeah pretty much normal.
If you are using a piece of knowledge rarely, it is less likely to remember it.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s some word from a foreign language you are trying to learn, a math formula or names and birthdays, even your own, or whatever.
I’m also terrible with names. But then again, I rarely use them. I even tend to forget my own birthday and would miss it if there weren’t people around me reminding me of it.
If other people know their age and birthday immediatly, that’s probably because they are regularly thinking about it. For names it is therefore helpful to use the name of persons you just got acquainted with very often in conversations with them.
A few months ago I was doing dishes and for some reason thought about my age and I literally couldn’t remember if I’d hit 50 yet. Had to do the math to remember I’m 45 and that’s quite a ways off. That’s an outlier for sure, but yeah I forget.
It just doesn’t come up often. There are fewer ands fewer markers. Before your 20s you’ve got hitting double digits, becoming a teenager, sweet 16, becoming an “adult”, then not being a teenager any more. In your 20s you’ve got becoming an adult again (and maybe being able to drink if 21 is your drinking age), and then maybe saving money on insurance at 25 if that even matters to you. Then nothing. You might demarcate 30, but nothing really changes. In many senses now it’s “just a number” and the individual increments fail to matter. There’s no differential reinforcement to remembering where you are on the number line.
When nobody, not even yourself, make a big deal about your birthday yeah. Happens to me all the time. I just turned 39, 2 weeks ago and before that I wasn’t sure if I was going to be 39 or 40 without doing some math.
I’ve gotten a funny look from the security attendant at the casino when I took a few seconds to answer my age when he was looking at my ID.
