Seeing some 40 year olds online speak like 20-30 year olds (only finding out their age after forming my impressions of them) broke an illusion I had about what 40 year olds are like. Now, I expect to feel relatively more like my current self.
As another example, a 45 year old I've known for my whole life recently told me they took a stupid amount of weed due to a silly implicit belief about the bioavailability of the delivery method. My response: "Color me shocked, you're pretending to be a teenager!"
Clearly my impression of old people has been filtered by the image they wish to present more than my impression of the young and by media portrayals - probably due to a lack of older friends.
When I was a child interacting with adults felt like interacting with people who "lost the empathy of being a child". I've never felt I lost that.
What's probably more likely now is that those people were part of a different, perhaps larger group that never seemed to 'mind' the directions and restrictions of life, and perhaps through shaming, subconsciously or not (perhaps to shaming, life expectations, etc.) some types of enjoyment and empathy are considered less tolerated, minority opinions feel less accurate to consensus so people stop saying them, etc.
There may also be something analogous to some negative stereotype of "boomer" as traditional, tech-clueless, yelling, intolerant, etc. that is not an accurate stereotype to all old people at all, but (especially for tech cluelessness) this may come from being unaware about acting a certain age but still doing so because being born in some era also means you have a "childhood in 1950" style experience instead of a "childhood in 2010" style experience, very much not comparable.
I think the usual cultural zeitgeist is that children have less empathy than adults? (though I personally have observed my empathy going down since childhood, even if my actual niceness and propensity to consider others went up - that is, I hurt people less out of carelessness while also caring less about doing so).
When I see an angry person, or a Taylor Swift fan, or a fifty year old, I tend to assume that they are thoroughly experienced and on top of enacting being that kind of person.
The fifty year old is an odd one out though: nobody has any previous experience being as old as they are now! Not only that, but all of their experience is of being younger. And granted, some of it is only a little younger, but a lot of it is a lot younger!
Everybody just stumbled into being this old. It’s their first day.
Does this cause ‘acting ones age’ to warp over time? Today’s 45 year olds have an idea what acting 45 looked like for the 45 year olds that came before them, but they are also very used to acting younger than that.