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But “How old do you feel?” is an altogether different question from “How old are you in your head?”
“感觉自己多大年龄了?”与“在心里认为自己多大年龄了?”这两个问题截然不同。
The most inspired paper I read about subjective age, from 2006, asked this of its 1,470 participants—in a Danish population (Denmark being the kind of place where studies like these would happen)—and what the two authors discovered is that adults over 40 perceive themselves to be, on average, about 20 percent younger than their actual age.
我读到的关于主观年龄最有启发性的一篇论文是2006年发表的，研究者向1470名参与调查的丹麦人(这种类型的研究像是会在丹麦发生的)提出了这个问题，两位作者发现，四十岁以上的成年人平均认为自己比实际年龄年轻20%左右。
“We ran this thing, and the data were gorgeous,” says David C. Rubin (75 in real life, 60 in his head), one of the paper’s authors and a psychology and neuroscience professor at Duke University. “It was just all these beautiful, smooth curves.”
“我们进行了这项调查，数据非常漂亮。”戴维·鲁宾（实际年龄75，主观年龄60）说，他是该论文的作者之一，也是杜克大学心理学和神经学教授，“数据呈现的是优美、流畅的曲线。”
Why we’re possessed of this urge to subtract is another matter.
为什么我们有这种减龄的欲望则是另一回事。
Rubin and his co-author, Dorthe Berntsen, didn’t make it the focus of this particular paper, and the researchers who do often propose a crude, predictable answer—namely, that lots of people consider aging a catastrophe, which, while true, seems to tell only a fraction of the story.
鲁宾及其合著者多特·伯恩特森并没有将探究原因作为这篇论文的重点，而那些关注原因的研究者通常给出的是一个粗略的、可预测的答案，即许多人认为衰老是一场灾难，尽管这是事实，但远非故事的全貌。
You could just as well make a different case: that viewing yourself as younger is a form of optimism, rather than denialism. It says that you envision many generative years ahead of you, that you will not be written off, that your future is not one long, dreary corridor of locked doors.
你也完全可以提出另一个理由: 认为自己更年轻是一种乐观主义，而不是否认主义。也就是说，你预想着在未来的许多年，你依然能做很多事、不会被冷落，你的未来不是一条长长的、沉闷的走廊，四周全是被锁住的门。
I think of my own numbers, for instance—which, though a slight departure from the Rubin-Berntsen rule, are still within a reasonable range (or so Rubin assures me).
例如，我想到了我自己心目中的年龄，尽管与鲁宾-伯恩特森得出的规律略有偏离，但仍在合理范围内(至少鲁宾说是这样)。
I’m 53 in real life but suspended at 36 in my head, and if I stop my brain from doing its usual Tilt-A-Whirl for long enough, I land on the same explanation: At 36, I knew the broad contours of my life, but hadn’t yet filled them in.
在现实生活中我53岁，但在我心里，我仍停留在36岁，如果我让我的大脑停止胡思乱想足够久，我会得出同样的解释: 36岁时，我知道我生活的大致轮廓是什么样的，但还没有把轮廓填满。
I was professionally established, but still brimmed with potential. I was paired off with my husband, but not yet lost in the marshes of a long marriage (and, okay, not yet a tiresome fishwife).
我事业有成，但仍然充满潜力。我和丈夫结为夫妻，但还没有迷失在长期婚姻的沼泽中(好吧，目前还没有成为一个令人讨厌的骂街泼妇）。
I was soon to be pregnant, but not yet a mother fretting about eating habits, screen habits, study habits, the brutal folkways of adolescents, the porn merchants of the internet.
我很快就要怀孕了，但还没有成为一个为孩子的饮食习惯、电子设备使用习惯、学习习惯、青少年的粗野风气、互联网色情片卖家而烦恼的母亲。
I was not yet on the gray turnpike of middle age, in other words.
换言之，我还没有步入灰暗的中年之路。
