As our lives take different shapes, age tells us less about what we might have in common.
When I was younger, almost all my friends were roughly my age. Now the people closest to me are nine and sixteen years younger than me.
School puts you in a classroom with people born within a year of each other. University does the same. Then you start work alongside people at the beginning of their careers too.
For most of my twenties, the people that surrounded me were moving through life at roughly the same pace. In my forties, that’s no longer true. Now when I meet someone new, their age tells me very little about whether we’ll even have anything in common.
At points in our lives age can be useful. At seven, seventeen and twenty-one, age can tell you quite a lot about what life probably looks like. We organise education and healthcare around it. There are films you can watch, things you can buy and votes you can make based on how many years you’ve been alive.
Age gives us shared cultural reference points and unites us as generational cohorts. And for decades it was an easy shortcut for life stage. Not perfectly, because lives have never been identical. But there was enough overlap in lives for “people my age” to mean “people like me.”
I’ve interviewed women who are the same age as me, all around the world. And often, age has been one of the only things we’ve had in common. Some are grandparents, others are looking after teenagers, while some have toddlers. Then there are those, like me, who haven’t had children. We’re all forty-seven. This is no single life stage that describes us.
Age tells us how long someone has lived. We keep asking it to tell us how they have lived.
I wrote in the first Kaleidoscope Lives piece about how the old stages of adulthood haven’t disappeared. They’ve scattered. They happen at different ages, in different orders and increasingly on top of one another.
That has changed something else as well: how we find and recognise the people who are like us.
Sociologists use the term homophily to describe our tendency to form relationships with people who are similar to us. At age eight we don’t go out looking for people who share our values and outlook on life. We just become friends with the kids sitting next to us.
When we’re kids our friendships happen because we’re put in rooms with kids our own age. As adults, the places we meet friends whose life patterns overlap with ours changes. There are places we naturally encounter potential friends. The school gate is a good example. On a child’s first day of school, the children walking into the classroom are roughly the same age. The parents standing outside can span decades from their 20s to 40s.
And then there are places we actively seek friends out. Walking groups, sports clubs, volunteering, even organised solo holidays. As our lives become more varied, and old life stages become less reliable ways of uniting us, community gives us other ways to connect. A book group doesn’t need everyone to be at the same point in life or age. They just need to be interested in reading the same book.
Researchers Catherine Elliott O’Dare, Virpi Timonen and Catherine Conlon studied friendships between older adults and people at least fifteen years younger. They called it “homophily of doing-and-being”: connection through what people did, how they thought and aspects of who they understood themselves to be.
That is happening in my life, and in the lives of people I’ve interviewed too. Friends years apart in age can be building something similar in their careers. There are those that bond over being newly single post-divorce, twenty years apart in age. The friend who can empathise with what it’s like to care for an elderly parent might be 35 or 60.
What connects us can be a shared experience, a hobby, our values or responsibility. I’ve started thinking about these points of connection as life pattern overlap.
Your whole pattern doesn’t have to match somebody else’s. Sometimes just one piece overlaps.
Pattern overlap means that different people can connect with different pieces of our lives. The friend you travel with isn’t necessarily the friend you call when you need advice at work. The person in your writing class might understand your creative ambition better than the person who has known you for thirty years.
One person doesn’t have to overlap with your whole pattern. A person can come into your life because your patterns overlap at a particular moment. Then your life changes and the pieces move. We’ve always formed relationships this way to some extent but what’s changed now is the sheer diversity in patterns.
Age itself is becoming less straightforward. Researchers call the difference between how old we are and how old we feel subjective age. Analysis of over 294 studies from around the world found that children tend to feel older than they are, while adults tend to feel younger as they age. Among those over 60, the average gap between chronological and subjective age ranged from 13 to 18 per cent.
Age is becoming an increasingly incomplete description of our lives. And yet we still use it as a benchmark to measure each other.
We search “what should someone my age be earning” We ask, “should I own a house by now?” or “How far should I be able to run at my age?”
But what exactly does the average 47-year-old tell you about where you should be in life. Are you behind or ahead?
The people I have most in common with now aren’t the people born in the same year as me. They’re the people whose patterns overlap with mine. The ones building something, starting again, exploring their creativity and wanting the same things.
We haven’t become less alike. We’ve changed what “alike” means.
This article is the third in a series exploring Kaleidoscope Lives: a framework for thinking about modern adulthood. I’ll be exploring what happens when adulthood stops following one recognisable sequence and why we need better language for the lives that emerge instead.