I recently spoke with a friend I hadn't seen in nearly 20 years. We met on a Zoom call, a detail that will eventually date us, the way earlier generations can be placed by their pagers, fax machines and Walkmans. He looked almost exactly as I remembered him--maybe a tick leaner, a little more settled in the face, but recognizably himself.

We have both done well enough by the usual measures--work that holds, a degree of financial security, a reputation that, in our respective corners, precedes us by a step or two. These are the markers you're told will accumulate into something like adulthood. They are supposed to add up to a condition that feels stable, finished, settled into its own authority.

Yet there was a moment, looking at him on that screen, when it seemed just as plausible we had arrived here by accident, having learned the language without ever quite absorbing the meaning. Because the internal sense of it hasn't kept pace.

There's a line often attributed to George Orwell who, writing in his 40s, noted the persistence of youth in the mind--the way a person continues to experience himself as the same consciousness moving forward, even as everything around him alters. That continuity can steady you. It can also leave you unprepared for the point at which the life you once regarded as distant becomes your own.

I'm finding myself in that position more often than I would have expected.

I don't remember any male relatives who lived as long as I have. My sense of a life's length was formed elsewhere, under a different set of assumptions, with a different ceiling. They sit in the background, shaping your sense of proportion. What counts as "later." What counts as "enough." What counts as the outer edge of things.

Then, if you're fortunate, that edge moves.

Not dramatically. It just keeps receding, until one day you realize you are standing in territory you never quite planned for. You have outlived the model you were given, and with it the sense of where the story was supposed to turn.

That recognition arrives as an adjustment you didn't know you were making.

French writer Marcel Proust understood that time, as we experience it, doesn't proceed in a straight line. It collapses, folds back, re-appears without warning. A whiff of madeleine, a phrase, a face on a screen--suddenly the distance between decades disappears. What you thought of as the past presents itself as closer to the surface, intact, waiting.

What Proust leaves you with is a sense that the past remains available, not as history but as presence. Which helps explain why the internal sense of age can feel so stubbornly out of sync with the external one.

A year at 17 has a different weight than a year at 67, because the mind has learned what to expect. The days pass with less resistance. You move through familiar structures--work, conversation, obligation--with practiced efficiency, and when you look back, the record appears thinner than you assumed it would be.

It isn't that less has happened. It's that less has announced itself. And yet, the feeling remains implausible.

I still experience myself as I did in my early 30s. Not physically--that would be a stretch--but in terms of orientation. The same internal voice, the same sense of moving forward into something not yet settled, an impatience with the status quo that

hasn't burned off, and the lingering assumption that the real work is still ahead.

There are moments when I recognize that I am now the adult in the room--the one expected to know, to decide, to absorb the uncertainty of others--and it lands with persistent surprise.

You would think that sensation would pass. It doesn't. It repeats, in slightly different forms, across different contexts.

Psychoanalyst Erik Erikson described adulthood as a series of negotiations rather than a destination. What he leaves unsaid, or doesn't resolve, is how little those negotiations seem to alter the underlying sense of self. You accumulate roles, obligations, histories. You become, in the eyes of others, someone with standing, whose presence carries a certain weight.

But internally, the earlier versions remain available. Not as memory, but closer to the current operating system.

Which may explain why the word "adult" continues to feel assigned rather than earned.

You pay taxes. You vote. You sit in rooms where decisions are made and discover, occasionally, that you are the one expected to make them. People listen. Or pretend to. The structure holds.

And yet the internal calibration remains slightly off, as though you are still waiting for someone older, more fully formed, to step in and assume responsibility for the whole enterprise. No one does.

Years pass. Responsibilities accumulate. The good life takes on a shape that can be described without irony. Still, the same consciousness persists, adjusting as needed but never fully relinquishing its earlier sense of itself.

There's a moment, usually brief, when the idea of retirement presents itself as something other people do. Then you realize that, by any external measure, you are standing inside that category. You are the person who is supposed to be thinking about the end of work, the narrowing of the horizon, the management of what remains.

I have no particular interest in that arrangement.

Not out of defiance. More out of disbelief. The internal clock has not advanced to that setting. It continues to run on an earlier schedule, one that assumes there is something ahead that hasn't been defined yet. The notion of stepping away from that feels less like a decision than a misreading of the situation. So you keep going.

You write the column. You plan the book. You move on to whatever comes next without acknowledging that it belongs to a different phase of life than the one you had in mind. The external structure adjusts--titles, expectations, the faintly irritating deference that comes with age--while internally the same consciousness continues, largely unchanged.

It is possible that this is how it works. That the mismatch isn't a problem to be solved, but a condition to be lived with. The body registers the years, the record accumulates, and the mind, for the most part, keeps its own counsel.

pmartin@adgnewsroom.com

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