When Gods Fumble: Learning to Love the Mortal Arc

I’m shocked that I need reading glasses but unsurprised that my university classmates look middle-aged in their Facebook photos.

This cognitive dissonance lives in every mirror encounter—the daily surprise that I, specifically I, am subject to the same temporal laws that obviously govern everyone else. Time is happening to me personally, not just to the abstract category of “people my age.”

In my mind, I age differently than other people. Their wrinkles make sense; mine feel like administrative errors. Their gray hair signals maturity and the passage of time; mine suggests something has gone wrong with the natural order, some mistake in the cosmic accounting. I expect my contemporaries to look their age while remaining personally offended that I look mine.

The internal image I carry of myself hasn’t updated with my reflection. When I think “me,” I picture someone younger—not dramatically so, but younger nonetheless. The person in the mirror is technically me, but also somehow not-me, a slightly distorted version that will presumably correct itself once whatever temporary condition is causing this aging appearance resolves.

Except it won’t resolve. This is not temporary. The reading glasses aren’t a phase. The wrinkles aren’t a misunderstanding. The gray hair isn’t going to apologize and leave. But some deep, stubborn part of my psyche refuses to integrate this information, continues to believe that while aging is happening all around me, I remain somehow adjacent to the process rather than immersed in it.

What if self-perception is the last place where magical thinking survives? We’ve abandoned most of our childhood illusions—we know we’re not special, that rules apply to us, that consequences follow actions. But this one delusion persists: surely time treats me differently. Surely I’m the exception.

Perhaps this cognitive dissonance serves a protective function. If we fully internalized our own aging with the same clarity we perceive it in others, we’d spend every moment acutely aware of our decline. The denial isn’t complete—we know intellectually that we’re aging—but it’s enough to prevent constant existential crisis. We half-believe our own exceptionalism because full belief in our ordinariness would be unbearable.

Or perhaps it’s simpler: the image we hold of ourselves was formed when we were younger and hasn’t received the necessary updates. Our internal avatar calcified somewhere in our twenties or thirties, and while we’ve added information about life experience and accumulated knowledge, we never upgraded the physical rendering. Meeting our reflection becomes a daily encounter with version mismatch—the software says one thing, the hardware shows another.

The cruelty is that this dissonance never fully resolves. We don’t eventually look in the mirror and think, “Yes, exactly as expected.” Each new sign of aging arrives as fresh surprise, fresh evidence that the exception we thought we were never existed. The reading glasses, then the bifocals, then the hearing aids, then the cane—each one prompts the same shocked thought: “Already? Me?”

Yes. Already. You.

Time’s democracy extends to self-perception last of all. We accept that everyone ages. We accept that we will age. But accepting that we are aging—present tense, active process, happening now—requires defeating the magical thinking that insists we’re somehow different, somehow exempt, somehow the one person time will forget to fully claim.

We’re not. The surprise we feel at our own aging is the last gasp of childhood omnipotence, the final territory where we believe ourselves special. And every mirror, every photograph, every reading glass, every moment of forgetting a name we should remember—all of it works to erode that final illusion.

We are not exceptions. We never were. The only question is how long we’ll maintain the cognitive dissonance before accepting what we’ve always known about everyone else applies, with equal force and equal indifference, to us.