Have you ever looked at old yearbooks—for me, that would be from 1940s or 1950s—and thought, “Wow! Those young people look so old!”

As a teen in the 1970s, I remember looking at the pictures of people from the middle of the century and thinking that they looked older than I considered myself at the time. In fact, older people in images from those decades appeared unfathomably old to my young set of eyes.
Such is the plight of any generation we harken from. We look at future ages and can’t imagine them, and we marvel at the automatic “agedness” of generations past. In my adolescent world where we printed color pictures and enjoyed Polaroid images, the black-and-white pictures of the past looked even more remote.
Fast forward to now where pictures are produced digitally in the millions of millions, and I’m sure my generation’s past looks charmingly quaint by the standards of young people today. I can imagine how they would consider how incredibly “old” and “dated” the images of my senior yearbook (extending waaaaay back to 1980) look at this point.

However, as a woman on the other side of 50, I can attest that I don’t feel as old as I may appear in spite of those dated photographs. And there is the quandary of what it means to age these days, anyway. We are living longer, working longer, having children later, and ultimately doing more into our later years of life.

Aging, and just what that means, was the subject on my mind as I prepped this week to speak with Jann Freed, my guest on The Delicious Story. She is a leadership coach and speaker who also deals in the subject of becoming a Sage and what it is to age with purpose.