Narrative Coherence and Identity, Or: “I Don’t Feel My Age”

”I don’t feel my age” lies not in denial but in neurobiology. Our brain, designed to compress, abstract, and reconstruct our experiences, treats recent memories similarly across ages. This creates an illusion of temporal uniformity, where five years feels like five years, whether we’re fresh out of college or nearing retirement. While time marches objectively, our internal narrative—crafted by selective memory and episodic compression—follows its own rules.